Sun-Powered, but 10,000 Times More Powerful Than Conventional Solar Energy 

“The most powerful engine in our solar system sits a mere 93 million miles away. It fuses atoms together every second, creating more energy than humanity could use in a lifetime.”

Those were the first two sentences of a recent issue of The Daily Disruptor, written by Ian King.

I’ve been a fan of Ian King for quite a while – ever since he became the man behind the very successful trading newsletter Strategic Fortunes. His track record of identifying financial and economic trends is remarkable. But more important to me is that he is equal parts insightful, thoughtful, and modest – a rare and welcome combination in the investment advisory business.

Right now, Ian is excited about a scientific breakthrough that was made at the Los Alamos National Laboratory earlier this year and quietly disclosed to the public in July. He says that what these researchers achieved is a “milestone in fusion energy… that could reshape how America powers its factories and fuels its AI data centers as it reclaims its role as the world’s industrial leader.”

Ian explains:

“For decades, the holy grail of fusion has been ‘ignition.’ That’s the moment a reaction produces more energy than it takes to start it.

“That barrier finally fell in 2022, when scientists at the National Ignition Facility in California made history with a fusion shot that put out more energy than the lasers pumping into it. It was a scientific first and proof that ignition is possible on Earth.

“But ignition is just the beginning. The real prize is what physicists call a ‘burning plasma.’ That’s when the reaction throws off so much heat that it keeps itself alive. Our Sun does this. Its hydrogen atoms collide, fuse, and burn endlessly without outside help. And that’s what’s so exciting about what just happened in Los Alamos.

“Using a new setup called THOR, the team managed to push plasma into that self-heating zone. And for a very brief moment, the reaction didn’t just burn. It fed itself. Now, that might not sound like a big deal, but this has been one of the hardest problems in all of science to solve. It took more than a decade of trial and error just to get lasers aligned perfectly around a fuel pellet to cause ignition.

“The Los Alamos scientists improved on earlier designs with smaller chambers, sharper diagnostics, and smarter modeling. These refinements made the burn more efficient and resulted in a fusion shot that gets us closer to claiming the power of the Sun here on Earth.”

He cautions that the commercial production of fusion energy is not “there yet.” The scale of this experiment was small and the generation of electricity from fusion has not happened. “But it’s a step closer to the day when fusion could deliver nearly unlimited clean energy at costs that fossil fuels just can’t compete with.”

America’s industrial sector accounts for 35% of all US energy consumption. Most of that is in manufacturing.

At the same time, AI is triggering a power crunch unlike anything in modern history. By 2028, US data centers are projected to consume 580 terawatt-hours of electricity every year.

Source: US Department of Energy

That’s more than the entire power use of some countries.

Semiconductor factories are also massive energy consumers. Intel’s new Ohio “Silicon Heartland” site is expected to draw as much electricity as a small city. TSMC’s facility in Arizona will need hundreds of megawatts just to operate.

The Energy Information Administration says total US power demand will hit record highs in 2025 and 2026.

And today, natural gas still supplies nearly 40% of that energy.

Ian continues:

“But imagine if America could power all of this with virtually unlimited clean energy that isn’t tied to oil markets, gas pipelines, or foreign suppliers. US consumers already spend about $1.7 trillion a year on energy. That’s nearly 7% of GDP. And that staggering number keeps growing as demand from manufacturing and AI accelerates. But the payoff from abundant energy promises to be just as staggering. That’s why this breakthrough is so exciting. And why government labs aren’t the only ones chasing this dream.”

Private capital is becoming interested in fusion energy and industry leaders are making early bets.

In 2021, fusion companies raised about $1.9 billion. By mid-2025, that number surged past $9 billion. Helion Energy, backed by Sam Altman, has already broken ground on a fusion pilot plant in Washington State that it hopes to have running by 2028. Commonwealth Fusion Systems is targeting the early 2030s for its Virginia plant. And Xcimer Energy is planning a prototype by the end of the decade.

Ian again:

“Fusion is just one piece of a much larger puzzle. Because America is investing across multiple fronts at once. We’re building semiconductors in the desert, EV plants in the Rust Belt, AI datacenters in the South, and quantum labs in Colorado. All these investments will require as much more power as we can possibly produce right now. That’s why we’re also investing in energy breakthroughs that could power them all.

“Moments like these can create generational wealth. We saw it happen with steel in Pittsburgh, cars in Detroit, and semiconductors in Silicon Valley. Each of those industries lifted entire regions. And they made fortunes for those who invested early. With fusion, we could be watching the early signs of something just as big.”

If you’d like to know more about this story and Ian King, click here.

David Stockman: Sell Your Stocks Now!

Every seven or eight years, I read something that challenges the comfort I have in how my stock portfolio is structured. And sometimes, after talking to Dominick, my broker, and some of the stock analysts I trust, I make a decision that alters to some degree the amount of money I have in stocks as compared to how much I have in other asset classes.

I’m going through that thought process now after reading essays written and published in the last several weeks by Alex Green, Bill Bonner, Porter Stansberry, and David Stockman, to name a few.

All of them have serious concerns about the growing and now-gigantic US debt, which broke through the $37 trillion barrier last month.

One of those essays – “Sell the Bonds, Sell the Stocks: Demolition Donald Can’t Save Us!” by David Stockman (published on July 3) – articulates not just the debt problem, but several other ugly facts about the US investing environment that, as a group, have left me wondering if I should make some changes.

As Stockman points out, besides the federal debt, the US economy is burdened by corporate debt and personal debt, the whole of which is more than $100 trillion.

The last time I wrote about this I said that there are only three ways an economy can respond to debt at this level: a massive depression, sustained stagflation, or a period of abnormally large growth. In either of the first two cases, the middle class effectively absorbs the debt by getting poorer. In the third case, everyone gets richer, including the government, because the larger GDP results in larger tax revenues, even if the tax rates are lower.

Trump and those on his fiscal and monetary team are hoping for the third option. They are hoping that the tax cuts the Big Beautiful Bill preserved as well as the new ones it created will stimulate significant growth in the coming several years. I’m going to hope so too. We all should.

But Stockman, and all the other guys I listen to on this subject (see above), don’t think that’s going to happen.

If they are right, Stockman’s prediction of continued stagflation is the next best outcome and the most likely one. There are ways to preserve and even grow wealth during stagflation, but the ones I like best are direct investments, not stocks.

But the stock market is overvalued. Way overvalued from my conservative investing perspective. The S&P 500 is trading now at 30 times earnings! That, in my opinion, is almost double what it should be. My approach to stocks has always been buy-and-hold. But now I’m thinking about lightening the portion of my assets that are in stocks. Or maybe even getting out of stocks entirely.

I’m going to talk to Dominick about my concerns and see what he has to say. I’m going to tell him that I’m feeling like I should be happy with the gains I’ve made with stocks since we started the Legacy Portfolio, and particularly since we brought in some of the tech businesses he liked. And I’m going to tell him that I’d be quite comfortable getting a guaranteed 5% ROI for the next several years while the market sorts itself out.

I’ll let you know what I’m going to do next week.

Is It Time to Sell Your Business? 

Are you a Baby Boomer looking to sell your business? Or the child of a Baby Boomer looking to buy one?

A window of opportunity is open right now that (1) is very large, and (2) won’t be open much longer.

It started with a gentle rise nearly 10 years ago and has been slowly increasing. It is peaking now and is predicted to stay near peak levels for another three to four years and then drop precipitously.

What’s especially cool about this trend is that it is providing very high profit opportunities for both buyers and also sellers. But it won’t last forever. So if this is something you are contemplating, you should start preparing for it now.

The numbers are impressive. According to Nick DiFrancesco, a business broker who wrote a persuasive article in LinkedIn that I read last week, the Baby Boomer generation (those born between 1946 and 1964) is in the midst of a “historic wave of retirement, with approximately 10,000 Boomers leaving the workforce each day.”

A decent percentage of these retirees own small- and mid-sized businesses, and many of those businesses are mature and profitable – giving buyers the opportunity to realize cash flow from day one and, if the buyers can expand market share or increase profits, enjoy significant and steady positive cash flow in the coming years.

There are about 12 million businesses at that size-level operating across the US today. And the majority of them are construction firms, manufacturing companies, and service operations – most of which are resistant to the AI/Robotics revolution that is putting so many higher tech and creative firms out of business, along with their owners and employees.

The size of the arbitrage is enormous. It’s estimated that more than $10 trillion worth of business assets will change hands through sales, mergers, or generational handoffs in the next 10 years. But the biggest part of that – along with the greatest opportunities for profit – is likely to come in the next three to four years.

Most of these businesses that are flooding into market now are owned by single-person operators who have no one to give them to and no succession plan for themselves. That presents the buyer with the opportunity to step in and solve the seller’s problem by making a quick deal on the best possible terms.

In his article, DiFrancesco identifies several factors that have lined up recently to create what he calls a “perfect storm” for making great deals on both sides of the sale.

He points out that…

* Banks have started lending again to small businesses, especially SBA-backed loans under $5 million.

* Buyers? They’re coming from everywhere – first-timers sick of corporate life, private equity firms, big companies buying up smaller businesses, and even tech entrepreneurs wanting to buy traditional businesses just to automate and scale with AI.

* Private equity is shifting down-market, hunting for smaller deals in the $1 million to $3 million EBITDA range because they see real growth there.

* Inflation is down and rates are stabilizing, making conditions for profiting for buyers and sellers better than they’ve been in years.

The buyer pool in 2025, he says, is more diverse than ever. “First-timers, often exhausted corporate folks trying to go independent, are utilizing SBA loans. Strategic buyers and rollup groups are actively snapping up companies to expand their reach. Even tech entrepreneurs are buying operations like HVAC or plumbing – not to work in them, but to automate and turn them into high-efficiency assets. Meanwhile, family offices and private equity firms, flush with cash and desperate for good deals, are competing at the smaller end of the market.”

If you are interested in following up on this, you can contact Nick DiFrancesco here.

I read his book real fast and discovered that the great Ray Dalio and I think the same way about one thing

You’d think that someone who’s written more than a dozen books on entrepreneurship, wealth building, and investing would himself be a regular consumer of such books, if only to keep up with his trade.

I don’t do that. In fact, since I challenged myself to read at least 50 books a year 25 years ago, fewer than 10% of them were of that kind. I have two excuses, one legitimate and one not.

My official excuse is that I have a method of speed-reading “practical” (i.e., non-fiction and non-philosophical) books that precludes me from calling what I do “reading.” It’s a system I’ve developed over the years that increases my reading speed from my standard (post-dyslexic, still-present ADD) rate of 200 words a minute to about 1,500 words a minute, which means digesting a book of 300 to 350 pages and 90,000 words in about four hours.

That’s not reading. It’s more akin to skimming. I dignify the practice by calling it “purposeful reading,” by which I mean seeking out nuggets of information and/or ideas that are currently useful to me, and ignoring everything else.

Today’s bit on the subject of wealth building is taken from a book I read “purposefully” last week. Ray Dalio’s Principles: Life & Work.

Ray Dalio is my age and, like me, he grew up on Long Island and began starting businesses when he was in his early teens. Unlike me, his interest was always in the financial markets, and so he had the advantage (and disadvantage) of limiting his business growth to one industry, which he eventually dominated through persistence, intelligence, and hard work.

As founder and top dog at Bridgewater Associates, a hedge fund that manages nearly $200 billion, he’s become not only personally super-rich, he has become a respected media pundit on the economy and the markets. (A glance at his track record will tell you he’s been on the money now for more than 40 years.)

There are things I don’t like about Dalio. I don’t like his politics, and I don’t agree with much of what he says about geopolitics either. But he certainly knows a lot more about making money in the stock market than I do. Or at least he’s done a lot better than I have by persuading or otherwise convincing super-wealthy people and financial funds to trust him with their millions.

Hey, sometimes you gotta give a self-made wealthy man his due. And I give it up to Dalio. He’s probably 100 times richer than me!

And I suppose that’s why, when I saw his book on a bookshelf in my house in Nicaragua (no idea how it got there), I picked it up and gave it a quickie read.

In Principles: Life and Work, Dalio presents what he calls the “guiding principles” that he used to create Bridgewater’s enormous growth and his personal success.

Because I am not fond of his social, political, and philosophical views (although I suspect he presents them primarily to be treated well by the Legacy Media), I reviewed the “principles” he laid out in the book with an arm’s length of critical distance.

I want to focus on one of those principles here, which I selected for three good reasons:

* It is a mental technique that Dalio used to develop the other techniques and strategies he recommends in his book.

* It’s a way of thinking that I’m familiar with because I’ve used it habitually in my career.

* It ties nicely into The Blind Watchmaker, a book by the great Richard Dawkins that I read (and reviewed here) recently, and is a key concept in a topic I’ve written about (and will continue to write about) in this blog: the mind as a self-learning machine.

The Mind as a Self-Learning Machine 

I don’t know whether this is common to most people, but I’ve always felt my mind was a tool that had could be constantly expanded and improved.

From the moment I began to think about thinking, which was as early as I can remember thinking, I was acutely aware of the fact that there were things I could figure out and problems I could solve more quickly and with greater ease than others. These were mental challenges that involved conceptualization and engineering: putting bits and pieces together to form a coherent whole.

I was proud of my ability to do that, but I’m happy to say that I never assumed it would be available to me indefinitely or would automatically improve as I got older. On the contrary, I always had the sense that if I did not continually and continuously use and sharpen those skills, they would eventually get rusty and less sharp.

In the same vein, in those early years, I was also aware – although perhaps not as acutely – that there were things that I could not do quickly and easily. Routine things such as reading. (As I’ve said, I was and still am a bit dyslexic.) And paying attention at school. (I had and still have attention deficit disorder.) Happily, I never believed that these shortcomings could limit me in any serious way. I believed I could eventually overcome them or at least compensate for them if I put in the work and time.

How to Turn Your Brain into an AI Machine 

In retrospect, I see that I saw my mind as not just a box containing a fixed number of tools, but as a machine akin to a computer that could figure out solutions to problems through a series of simple, yes-and-no mental transactions, and could become better at learning how to think about something new by using thought processes that had helped me find solutions to problems in the past.

In Principles, Dalio says that he had a similar way of looking at the problems and challenges he faced in overcoming his early failures in business and eventually building Bridgewater to what it is today.

He says he believes that a key element in his success was in not being intimidated by difficult problems or new challenges, but in reminding himself that the brain he was using was a better one than the brain he had earlier in his life, and that to move ahead, regardless of what he was facing, was a matter of installing new circuits when he could find them and inputting new facts and ideas on a constant and continual basis.

He recommends this as a practice for anyone reading the book. He also says that it is of the upmost importance to recognize that if you are running into roadblocks, they can be bypassed or overcome by looking around for more inputs – other facts, other opinions, and other ways of thinking about your problems and challenges.

Passing Roadblocks & Jumping Hurdles

I see this as a BIG strategy for success. But I know that for many people, including many very smart and ambitious people I’ve worked with over the years, it is a secret – i.e., a strategy that is not visible to them.

And that is often because of the success they enjoyed early in their careers – the success that came from using the tools that were already in the box they came with. Since these tools were so good at getting them from A to B, or even from B to C, they assumed they could get them from C to D.

But, as they climbed the corporate or entrepreneurial mountain, these tools were no longer useful. Some, in fact, could be detrimental.

I don’t have the time (and you don’t have the time) to get into too many examples here of how this happens all the time in every sort of business (and, really, in every sort of challenging human endeavor, as I’m sure Dalio himself would agree). I’ll give you one example and hope that suffices until I write about this again.

One of my partners in business has a gift for understanding the limits of personal integrity and business ethics. He spent the first half of his career in an industry where cutting the throats of one’s competitors was not just the game but the fun of the game, too.

When he came into my industry, he brought that mindset with him. And it served him well in hiring untrustworthy people and in avoiding business relationships with untrusty partners.

But it stymied him in growing his business beyond the $10 million range. When he reached that point, his instinctive reaction to anything that wasn’t going well was to look for the employee, the partner, or the competitor that was secretly doing him wrong.

This was bad for two reasons that were obvious to me.

His natural distrust of his employees made him susceptible to micromanaging their activities, which made those employees reluctant to be innovative or even to suggest doing things differently. And this, in turn, led to a corporate culture that was self-conscious, averse to innovation, and, in some cases, political.

The same mindset made it difficult – almost impossible – for him to go into joint ventures and marketing agreements with his competitors. Even when I could show him the clear win-win benefits to such relationships, he was incapable of opening his mind to them.

Now you can divine other diagnoses for his behavior, but to me it was grounded in the way he thought about his own mind. He could not accept the possibility that to achieve the growth he needed, he had to first be open to the possibility that the mental tools he had were no longer sufficient to do the job he wanted to do.

I could write a hundred more pages on this particular problem, this particular way of limiting one’s business potential and possibilities by being reluctant to inputting new facts, ideas, and even circuitry as the business or enterprise grows.

But I’ll leave it at that for the moment. If you suspect you might do better and accomplish more by considering this, you probably can.

Funding Your Retirement: 

How Safe Should You Be?

Mr. Money Mustache is someone I read now and then. His thing is retiring early. He himself retired when he was very young. I think he was in his late 20s, with a modest net worth. And he’s been writing about his experiences and his philosophy of early retirement ever since.

I don’t subscribe to his particular version of how little one needs to quit one’s day job. But I do believe that many of his insights, including the irrational fear many people (including yours truly) have about how much you need to retire are very solid.

In his latest newsletter, he talks about that. Click here. 

A Change of Plans 

Two years ago, I got clearance from my town to tear down my current office space in Delray Beach, an 11,000-square-foot storage building, and replace it with a 40,000-square-foot Class-A office building. The plan was to rent it to one or several of my businesses. That has been a very good investing strategy since I started building businesses 40 years ago.

Then the pandemic hit. Which brought on remote working. Which felt like it was going to be at least partially permanent. Which sated my appetite for acquiring more office space since I wouldn’t be needing more, even if the businesses continued to grow. So, I put the project on hold.

The same thing happened with the office buildings my partners and I have in Baltimore and London and Paris and other cities. The pandemic made us realize that the old model of centralized office locations, and the bedroom suburbs they spawned, may continue to exist, but as fractions of their former selves.

Notwithstanding the recent uptick from the bottoms hit early last year, I’m not bullish on office space right now. In Delray Beach or elsewhere.

By some metrics, this has been the worst year in the stock market since the Great Depression.

The larger indexes are down around 20%, and many tech stocks have lost 50% to 80% of their start-of-the year values.

What to do?

You can sell your stocks, take the loss, and put your money in cash. And then try to figure out when to get back into equities. The problem with cash, of course, is that it is currently losing 0.75% of its value every month – and that will increase if inflation pressures continue.

You could put your money in gold. The value of gold (and most other precious metals) historically keeps pace with inflation. In fact, gold is trading today at about $1,840 an ounce, which is about 8% higher than it was in January.

If you already have gold and enough cash to cover emergencies, you might want to look at what sort of stocks you are holding. If your portfolio includes what I call Legacy stocks (e.g., Nestles, Coca Cola, IBM), you can expect that their prices will, like gold, keep up with inflation. That’s because companies like these have the ability to gradually increase their prices as their costs go up.

If you have lots of tech stocks, you might want to ask yourself if you think the companies they represent will still be around if we enter into a recession. Most of the tech stocks I own (Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta) are big enough to recover from their currently discounted prices. So I may be buying more of them. If the tech stocks you own are smaller and less certain to survive a recession, you may want to think about dumping them.

If your portfolio is made up of, say, 10% smaller tech stocks, 50% to 60% Legacy stocks, and 30% to 40% of those world-dominating tech companies, you might want to consider doing what I’m doing: absolutely nothing.

In any case, keep these two facts in mind:

* About once a decade, the stock market experiences a downturn of 20% to 30%. That’s what we are seeing now.

* Since the stock market was created over 100 years ago, its overall value has been a one-way ride. Up about 8% to 10% a year, depending on how you measure it.