Beverly Hillbillies math
Never underestimate basics
Before the Kardashians, there were The Beverly Hillbillies.
They didn’t go viral.
They struck oil.
Instead of an OnlyFans account, they had crude bubbling up from the backyard.
And the entire premise of the show was culture shock.
Old common sense crashing head-on into elite manners, money, and social rules.
That clash never went away.
We experience it every day reading the WSJ, scrolling past some billionaire’s worldview, or listening to a polished CNBC interview that makes us feel either behind… or ignorant… or pressured to play a game we don’t understand.
You start thinking:
These people must know something I don’t.
Bitcoin solved that for a lot of people.
So did things like Pudgy Penguins, oddly enough, selling for I think $770,000 at one point.
Not because they’re magic.
But because they remove the psychological intimidation.
No gatekeepers.
No pedigree required.
Just conviction, patience, and common sense.
And common sense tends to get forgotten over time.
Like this one:
Buy cheap stuff.
Stick with it.
Take silver miners.
SSRM is an old silver miner
It’s been around a long time.
It’s not sexy.
It’s not a story stock.
If silver is headed toward $60, do you really believe SSRM is a $20 stock forever?
Or even a $40 stock?
Mining companies don’t explode higher the moment the commodity spikes.
They re-rate after high prices persist and form a range.
Why?
Because nobody wants to own a mine if the commodity crashes while fixed costs stay the same.
But the higher silver goes, the higher the floor becomes.
A 50% retracement from $60 is still very different than one from $25.
Don’t worry about why SSRM is $20 today.
These things tend to sort themselves out over time.
That’s the difference between investing, speculating, and trading commodities.
If you believe $40 is plausible at some point, a long-dated $40 call is cheap insurance.
Two years gives silver time to prove itself without needing perfect timing.
I don’t know exactly what’s holding SSRM back.
And neither should you.
That’s an analyst’s job — and most of them don’t even own the stock.
What I do know is that silver miners tend to move together.
And Turkey — if that remains their core operating base — is very cheap to operate in.
We’ll see.
As Granny used to say:
“Old violins make the sweetest music…
course ya still need the right beau.”
Seize the Day,
Eric
PS. This week for paid subscribers we take a deeper dive on Headlines and its interpretations. I was at the gym and this big options guy told me that this is what they do with screen capture and GPT but he thought what we were doing is more sustainable.
