The Unthinkable is about to happen to Gold Silver Why Iran is the Trigger

If you own gold or silver or even just a 401k with stocks, what's happening right now in the Middle East could be the single biggest wealth event of your lifetime. Iran's revolutionary guard just declared that, and I quote, not a liter of oil will pass through the Strait of Hormuz. That is 20% of the world's oil supply gone. And the last time something like this happened, 1973, before I was born, certainly before Winston was born, the stock market lost 45% of its value, gold went up over 2000%, and most regular investors got absolutely destroyed because nobody told them what was coming. By the end of this video, you'll understand exactly what happened in 1973, why it's happening again, and the specific playbook that Wall Street Insiders are using right now to protect and grow their wealth while everybody else is, well, panicking. My name is Felix Prehn. I'm an ex-investor and banker. That's Winston back there, the head of our research division, which is sleepy. And I've seen this play out, not in 73, but I've seen crisis play out since. And I always see again and again how retail investors get just slaughtered while a lot of people, well, not that many people, but the Wall Street guys make a heck of a lot of money. And I'm going to do something even better for you than this video, which will get you up to scratch with what the heck's going on there and how to protect yourself and everything else. But if you really want to learn how to pick stocks in moments like this, and these are the greatest opportunities, in my humble opinion, than ever. Remember last year we had that tariff crash? The people who knew how to pick stocks in that moment, they just carried that rally back out and they just got wealthier, right? So Wall Street has got three really simple rules for that, but I'm not going to explain to you this video because that will take like an hour or two. So I'm going to run a live session for you guys this weekend at felixprehn.org training and teach you Wall Street's secret three rules for buying stocks. It's free. Just get yourself a free seat and show up on time, felixprehn.org training, and I'll walk you through all of that. Because the guys on the big banks, they've seen this movie before. 1973, 1979, 1990, 2003. And every single time the investors who understood history, they made fortunes. The ones who didn't, well, they're still trying to recover and they're still like, you know, waking up in the middle of the night going, no! You know, that kind of thing. So let me briefly take you back to the early 70s. America was cruising, literally. The whole nation had become, in the words of one historian, swift and flowing along over a great network of highways, more than 3 million miles long. And Americans felt like there was plenty of oil, plenty of coal, and people were finding new ways to use that energy every day. Gas was really cheap. Cars were enormous, ginormous cars. I want one of those. And nobody really thought twice about filling up the tank. Actually, if you own one of those, if you own one of those big old enormous 60s US cars, put the model in the chat down below, I'd be interested. And the American dream literally ran on petroleum. Supply was endless, seemingly. And by 1969, American domestic oil production had peaked. So the US was becoming more and more reliant on foreign oil. You know, foreign buggers like me, oil, except I'm not an Arab. So they were importing about 35% of their supply from the Lovelies in the Middle East. And nobody cared, because oil was cheap. And when something is cheap, people just assume it's going to be cheap forever, right? And here's why I'm telling you this. Because that exact complacency, that's what we had before February 28th. Oil was pretty cheap, the Strait of Hormuz was open, and most investors assumed it would stay that way forever. Then, October 73, Israel is attacked by Egypt and Syria, the Yom Kippur War, and the US backs Israel. And Saudi Arabia, along with other Arab OPEC nations, decides to use the one weapon America never saw coming. They turned off the tap. The OPEC oil embargo hit the United States very hard, like a freight train. Oil prices didn't just go up, they quadrupled from $3 a barrel. Inflation is a real thing, by the way. $3 a barrel, it went to $12. Gas stations went out of fuel, signs went up everywhere, literally saying, sorry, out of gas, closed, that kind of thing. There was a limit, you could only get 10 gallons when you were buying gas. And Americans were waiting in line for houses to fill up a car. The cost of living shot up 8%, food prices went up 19%, furloughed 56,000 workers, and cities started turning off their streetlights to save energy. That's how serious it was. And the government's response, President Nixon, who was also dealing with a little thing called Watergate at the time, well, he lit the Christmas tree at the White House with only 20% of its normal lights, because nothing says we've got things under control and a dimly lit Christmas tree. But what people don't really talk about is what happened to investors. And that's the real lesson here you can apply to today. The 1973 stock market crash was one of the worst since the Great Depression. He rubs his hands, yay, opportunity. You know, the buying rules, you know what I'm talking about. Come and join me on Saturday, Felix Rensselaer slash training. The Dow went down 45%. 45%, right? That's like half of people's retirements gone. And it wasn't just America, London lost 73% of its value, Hong Kong dropped like crazy, global wealth was being incinerated, literally. Here's the part that should terrify every 401k and IRA holder watching this. The US stock market didn't recover to its real value until 1993. That was 20 years. Now, those of you who are looking at charts going, no, no, it's not 20 years. Yeah, if you adjust it for inflation, because the market just goes up with inflation. But if you actually take care of that, that was 20 years. So you were 45 when the crash hit. You're planning to retire at 65 and congratulations, you're back to where you were and you were 45. And those 20 years were an economic wasteland. Now, does any of that sound familiar? This is not a doom and gloom video, right? We're looking at opportunities here. We have a Middle East conflict. We have an oil supply disruption that is actually very hard to control because as long as Iran has like a couple of drones lying around and they can strap, you know, a hand grenade to it, they can seriously disrupt oil flow. So we've got inflation going up. We've got the stock market going down. You're getting that deja vu right now. And if you're getting that deja vu right now, put 1973 in the comments and I'll see that this is landing for you. Now, while the stockholders were getting slaughtered in the 70s, gold did something extraordinary. Just during the OPEC embargo in 73, gold rose 65 percent, but that was just the amuse-bouche, as they say in fancy restaurants. In 71, you see, Nixon had taken the US over the gold standard. Gold was never no longer pegged at a fixed price of $35 an ounce. It was free to find its real price while they were printing money like it was, you know, fun. And gold went from $35 to $120 by mid-73 and then kept climbing. By 1980, it had hit $850 an ounce. That's a 2,300 percent increase from its 71 price. So say you put 10k into that, you would have ended up with $243,000. Silver, well, it went way, way, way wilder, going up to 50 bucks in the 1980s. So what's the key insight here? Well, what I learned from my Wall Street mentors, guys who worked in banking for decades, the 70s proved something that most financial advisors still don't tell you, maybe they don't know about it. When governments print a lot of money, when inflation runs hot, when you get wars, chaos that disrupts our energy supply, paper assets get destroyed. Hard assets like gold and silver become the safe haven. At least that's my interpretation of it. Now, lots of people will tell you, oh, 1973, it's ancient history, forget about it. No, it's actually a user manual for right now. Because think of it like this, gold and silver are financial fire extinguishers. You don't need them and everything's fine. But when the building's on fire, and right now the building is very much on fire, at least in the Middle East, they're the only thing standing between you and potential room. Now, if you're still thinking, well, what do I buy? How do I protect myself? How do I benefit from this dip? At the moment, it's a dip, it could get a lot worse. Then join me on Saturday to be a free live trading where I teach you Wall Street's very own rules for picking stocks. The same rules my mentors taught me, the same rules that helped investors navigate the 70s, the 2008, and every crisis in between. And if you want to learn how to protect your portfolio and actually potentially profit when markets go haywire, join me live. The link is in the description, phoenixruns.org training. You might see it on the screen as well, but you can click on it down there. And if you're planning to show up for that, write learn in the comments, because that's really what it's all about. Learning skills for situations just like this. Now, we need to talk about the elephant in the room, the Strait of Hormuz. Most of us remember that last June, US and Israel contracted strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, and they said, well, the Department of Defense estimated they set back Iran's nuclear program by two years. Iran's response, well, they claimed to rebuild everything. Their foreign minister says they're prepared for defense. Iran's Revolutionary Guard has shut down the Strait of Hormuz, where one in five barrels of oil that the world digs up passes every single day. Now, we actually keep track of this. We have a tool that I built. You can get access to that. It's like six bucks a week. You can cancel any time, and we do that because we want you guys to be really, really well informed. And it tells you literally what's going on, where it's happening. It shows also the oil infrastructure, if you want to see where the pipelines are, for example. Not just that one, but all the major pipelines around the world. It tells you all of that, and it tells you, you know, which one's important or which one isn't. It gives you important military flights. You can see those. If you're into oil, gold and silver, seismic activity as in earthquakes is actually pretty important, for example. As we come into hurricane season, hurricanes and everything else, shipping lanes, all that good stuff is there. And the news will feed into this minute by minute. You can also see live the actual, not just the Strait of Hormuz, because that's important right now, but say you want to see the Red Sea, and if that's going all right, or the Suez Canal, or the Panama Canal, or any of them, Black Sea, and so on. You can see exactly what's going on there together with our trackers for gold and silver and everything else. That's really, really important. Intelligent Digest, and so on. That's all available for you guys. If you want to check that out, there's a Panama community. It's, as I say, six bucks a week, $6.23, I think. And you can just cancel it if you don't like it. So check it out down below. Now, oil prices have gone pretty haywire. They went to like $120. At the moment, they're a little bit lower, but still increased 2%. Brent crude oil prices are at over $100, which is pretty bonkers, and is definitely, therefore, feeding significantly into inflation, right? There are about 1,000 ships stranded in the Persian Gulf around this warning of $200 oil. And literally, if you look at the Strait of Hormuz and you see this massive pile up here of tankers, look how busy that is. These are all tankers. You don't know what the heck to do because they want to go in. They want to pick up oil and gas and fertilizer and everything else, and they can't. So this is like one of the most crowded places in the world for oil tankers because everyone's terrified to cross this. See how empty that is? See how empty that is? That is not normal. That is not what this normally looks like. Now, the International Energy Agency has responded by proposing the largest release of emergency oil reserves in history, 400 million barrels. The US is tapping its own strategic petroleum reserve for what's left of it, 172 million barrels. So officially, everything is under control, right? The strategic petroleum reserve will stabilize markets, which basically means we're dumping our emergency savings account into the market, and we're praying it works, and this will be over soon. Now, the Iranian economy is obviously in free fall. Inflation is up and everything else. Nuclear negotiations, well, they're completely failed and over. That'll never happen again, and both sides are basically dug in. Now, let me show you why this matters for your money now. Let's put 1973 and right now side by side. The first parallel is the trigger. In 1973, there was an OPEC embargo by Arab nations for punishing the US for supporting Israel. Now Iran is blocking the Strait of Hormuz in response to the US-Israeli strikes. Both times, a Middle East conflict directly targeting oil supply as a weapon against the West. The second parallel is that oil went from $3 to $12, 4x in 73, is surged past, you know, 100 bucks with warnings of $200. So the percentage movements are different, and that's because the US is a much larger oil producer now than it was, but the price shock is still there, and then inflation. It went to 8 to 14% in the 70s. Food went up 19%, for example. Why? Because fertilizer is an oil-derived product, and right now we're looking at 2.4% inflation, right? We're looking forward to a year of interest rate cuts. Well, now economists are projecting it could hit three and a half percent or higher, and that means interest rates will not go down, and that will impact your tech stocks, your fintech stocks, your biotech stocks, your AI stocks, and most people are still unaware. So if you see the parallels between 73 and right now, maybe write rhymes in the comments, because I think history always does. It's a Mark Twain quote, isn't it? History doesn't repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme. Is that a Mark Twain quote? Also, if you let me know that, put a Twain in the comments right there. Now, gold surged past $5,300 straight after the strikes, one of the most dramatic safe haven rallies we've seen. Central banks have been buying gold like their lives depend on it, and silver, well, it broke $100 for the first time ever. Comex silver inventories are draining hard. That's also something we track, by the way, in the same community that you can get access to by the link down below, you can track in here how much silver there's left in Comex, for example, how much gold there's left in Comex, and the trend is pretty punishing, right? Pretty punishing stuff. So central banks are holding silver. China is restricting silver exports. Comex vaults are draining, and the official advice is staying at 60-40 portfolios, stocks and bonds, woo-hoo, keep doing what you've always done, right? Yeah, the world's changed a little bit. JP Morgan says gold could hit $6,000 this year. It could hit a lot more than that this year if this continues. Silver forecasts are up to $150 an ounce by sort of more of the respectable people. I'm not talking about, you know, the loony chicks who say it's going to be $500. So we've established the parallels, right? Now let's get to the actionable part. There are five investor lessons from 73 that could save or maybe even make you a fortune. I'm promising that. I'm not a financial advisor. I'm not registered for anything that I'm aware of. Now the first lesson is energy disruptions create inflation. Inflation destroys paper wealth. It's not just your gas that gets more expensive. Everything gets expensive. Transportation goes up. Food prices go up. Manufacturing costs go up. So the cost of living in the 70s rose 8% almost immediately, and then it peaked at like 14% by 1980. Crazy period of inflation. So what does it mean? Well, it means you have $100,000 in your savings account in 73. By 1980, only 50k is left in terms of its ability to actually buy stuff. So you lose half your money. U.S. inflation is already running at 2%. Now we're looking at 3.5% or more if oil is at $100, which is where it is as I'm recording this. So cash is definitely not king. The people sitting on the sidelines going, I'm going to wait this thing out. Yeah, they're taking the most risk. But the investors who held hard assets, that's lesson from the 70s, gold, silver commodities, they preserved and they grew their wealth. The ones in cash and bonds got destroyed. Salaries got destroyed. Now lesson number two is governments are always late. Always. In 1973, the U.S. had no strategic petroleum reserve. There was no energy department. There was no contingency plan. So the most powerful nation on earth was called flat footed by an oil embargo. What did Nixon do? Dimmed the Christmas lights. And Ford literally created a bumper sticker, I'm not making this up, that said don't be foolish. F-U-E-L-I-S-H. So Carter then actually tried to do something structural. He created the Department of Energy, invested in solar. You can put solar panels on the White House. Reagan ripped them back off and went back to drill baby drill. But actually the Carter investments led to fracking, which eventually made the U.S. an oil exporter. So the guy who wanted to save the planet said actually the opposite, which is ironic. The world is full of irony. So my lesson here is don't wait for the government to protect your portfolio. This dumping of oil from emergency reserves, it doesn't do much. Why? Because the market knows emergency reserves are a band-aid. They're not a solution. It doesn't fix anything. So by the time politicians react, the damage is done, the smart money moved months ago, and the government shows up with a mop, you know, after the flood. But institutional investors, this is what I learned from my Wall Street mentors, they don't wait for government policy. They position themselves ahead of that and follow Wall Street's rules. Again, same rules, I'm going to teach you if you join me live on Saturday. And then lesson number three is there is an oil-gold relationship. And most of you have never heard of this. It's one of the most powerful early warning systems in finance, it's called the gold-oil ratio. It measures how many barrels of oil one ounce of gold can buy, and it tells you something crucial about when the money is flowing. Now in 73, before the embargo, the ratio spiked to 34. Gold was surging while oil was cheap. The market was screaming that something was wrong. Gold was pricing in the crisis before it even happened, because somebody always knows. Then oil quadrupled, the ratio dropped back into the mid-teens. So think about gold as the thermometer, oil as the patient. When gold starts running a fever, rising fast while everything else stays flat, it's telling you the patient is about to get very, very sick. And that's why I've been watching this gold and silver rally last year with, well, I enjoy it because it makes me money, but I also think, well, it does mean there is something seriously wrong here. And it's going to hit a lot of people flat-footed, which is why we've been covering this. So listen when gold is running a fever, watch that ratio. Now lesson four is that gold is, if gold is a safe haven, say, silver is the safe haven, but it's taking steroids. So in the 70s, silver didn't just follow gold, it outperformed massively. Silver rose, say, in 2008 to 2011, silver rose 10-fold, gold tripled. Silver has always been more volatile, but that volatility does cut both ways. So in bull markets, it cuts in your favor, but when it ends, it also goes the other way. So risk management is really, really key here. Why? Because it's a monetary metal like gold, safe haven, and it's an industrial metal. It's used in solar panels, electric vehicles, AI infrastructure, electronic medical devices, but all of that. So 60% of all the silver demand comes from industrial applications, not from stacks. Now silver has been in a supply deficit for six years running, and the gold to silver ratio, which we track again here in our little community, at the moment is at 60, which isn't actually that unusual. When it goes extreme, silver tends to massively outperform. So silver gives you essentially more bang for your buck in a bull market, but it is also a heck of a lot more volatile. So gold stability, silver for potential upside, as long as you know what you're doing with the downside protection. Lesson number five, and that's probably the most important one. Complacency kills portfolios. After the 70s oil crisis, the US eventually developed fracking. Oil became abundant again. And what happened? In the word of energy experts, fracking simply was a pressure relief valve. People were no longer worrying about it. And there's a guy who served in the Carter administration, and he said, the problem is, as we got further away from the oil embargoes, we got complacent. And that complacency is exactly what we had before February 28th. Cheap oil, open shipping lanes, the general assumption of the Middle East was fine and someone else's problem. So the biggest risk in your portfolio isn't a market crash. It's the assumption that a crash can't happen. The investors who got destroyed in the 70s, they were not stupid. They were complacent. So don't be those. And if this video has made you rethink what you're doing, even just a little bit, then come and join me on Saturday at phoenixfence.org slash training. And I will teach you how Wall Street picks stocks in this scenario and in any scenario. And if I can summarize what we've covered today, yes, understand the macro. Don't watch CNBC and news endlessly. It doesn't really help you. But do understand the macro, which is also why we've built our tool here, because it tells you what the heck's going on there. Having some hard assets is a good idea, in my humble opinion. Not everything, but some. And then watch the signals. Watch the ratios. Watch the COMEX inventory levels. Watch what the bankers are doing. And definitely don't panic. Definitely don't panic. There's an opportunity in this. But the 70s changed the world overnight. Those who understood it made a fortune. Those who didn't, probably still trying to recover from it. So don't be the person who says, oh, I wish I would have paid attention, but the video was a bit too long. I couldn't be asked. Be the one who said, I could see it coming. I was prepared. I learned the rules. It was the thing that jolted me to become a better investor. And that's really our ambition and mission here. So come and show up for yourself on Saturday, phoenixfence.org slash training. Winston and I will be there. He might even be awake. Winston. Oh, little Winston. He's pretty sleepy today. I thank you for watching. If you got some value out of this, share the video with somebody so other people are also better informed. All the best. Right now, there is a crisis brewing in one of the world's most important markets and almost no one's talking about it. And I wasn't going to make this video, but as I'm on holiday, I was working.