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Aug. 22, 2025 - Lionel Nation
28:52
Bob Kudla Interview: Unlock Wealth Building Strategies with the Trump Investment Juggernaut
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Well, my friends, it's that time again for our good friend, Mr. Bob Kudla, who joins us from tradewithlinel.com, tradewithlinel.com, 80948-1408.
Bob, every time we talk, I'm always reminded that I think we have some of the best conversations because, frankly, be honest with you, most financial stuff bores the living, you know what, out of me because it's kind of dry.
You do a perfect admixture of finance, investment, but also current events, politics, the real world.
So, wow, once again, my friend, what's on your top of mind today sir yeah i i think we're going into a transition here so we had uh my personal view is that we had to blow off top here from april into august you know a lot of these um names have gone up 100 in six months and i'll give you an example if you look at palantir okay palantir oh oh yeah a year ago was
a $20 stock and then it hit $190.
Now I love the company in terms of of the its ability to generate market share and cash flow, people may disagree on, you know, is it evil incarnate or is it or is it a great company?
But I'm going to set that aside for a second and and tell you that in less than two weeks it went from 190 to 140.
And that's how fast these high flyers are going to get blown up.
And because we're unhinged from fundamentals and we're even unhinged from technical analysis.
And right now it's all about what they call the derivatives.
And I call it the Titanic effect, right?
You know, you're out there and all you do is seeing this little ice chunk floating on the surface.
But underneath is where all the danger is.
And that's the same with the market.
The market's being driven by option contracts.
And these things can evaporate in a minute.
And once they evaporate, how it worked.
well i'll and i'll get a little technical for people too what they're dealing with here is that when when you when you go ahead and you buy a call option right a call option is basically a leverage bet hoping that the stock's going to go higher than what you paid for the option okay a lot of times it's like a 10 to 1 bet and so there's so many And so somebody on the other side of that is taking that trade and they're typically market makers, right?
And what they're not in the business of making directional bets, they're in the business of being a broker.
So what they do, they immediately hedge that bet by they sell the call, but then they turn around and they buy the stock.
Okay.
And so what they do then is they help you then accelerate that price movement.
Well, once you sell that call, or if you don't renew that call, they're released from that obligation and they'll close that position.
And so what you have happen is that you go from what's called a virtuous effect to a deleterious effect.
And you see these moves are accelerated.
That's why a lot of times you'll see, you ever hear the phrase up like an escalator, down like an elevator?
That's why this happens because these market makers are no longer obligated to hedge a position.
The position is gone and they just disappear.
And they have no obligation to make a market.
They just have an obligation to be neutral.
And so we're in that situation now where we're hitting $1 trillion of notional, which means if you add up all the bets.
And then typically these bets don't work out.
But the last quarter, the last three months, first time I think in history is that call buyers made money on their trade.
Typically, if you're a buyer of options, you lose money.
People don't know that.
The dirty little secret of trading is that, you know, you're in.
the new york casino not vegas and so we're in a situation now where you just can't keep putting on more and more and more what they call notional risk and it's going to sag the market and i told people to expect anywhere between a 15-20% correction between last week and basically the 15th of August to the 15th of October, expect a pretty strong pullback.
And then we'll have to wait and see going into the end of the year.
It's typically a bullish period to see if that then re-engages or if we're going to have a 2000-2002 event where you get basically an 18-month bear market.
And a lot of it depends on how people view the Federal Reserve in September lowering rates.
I think the betting markets are saying like 92%.
Tomorrow, you and I are talking Thursday before Jackson Hole.
I'm not sure when you're going to release this.
Today.
Okay, so if he starts lowering interest rates and people believe that we're in a lowering rate environment, the market follows interest rates down.
People have this weird notion is that, well, when interest rates fall, that means the economy is going to get better and that means the stock market is going to go higher.
It's already been front run.
market follows the interest rates down because they correctly observe the fact fact that fed wouldn't be lowering interest rates unless economic activity is deteriorating and so um the same thing happened when they're raising interest rates.
Everybody said, oh my God, the market's going to crash.
Well, no.
They're raising interest rates.
Typically, the Fed's behind.
So the market makers or the market influencers, I should say, are front-running these moves because it's pretty easy.
How would if I told you, I said between now and a year from now, I can pretty much guarantee you'll make 25, 30% in the market, no stock market risk whatsoever, and you can go away.
You would say, sign me up, coach, right?
Well, that's what happens when you start lowering interest rates is that the bond yields fall, the bond price goes up.
up and people just they'll flock to that and they'll move out of they don't have stock market risk they don't have individual stock risk they know the fed has their back they buy they buy the long bond you know they buy tlt etf and you'll see a 25 30 move higher in in those bond mark prices and the market follows the other way around so that's what i think is up in the air right now my personal view is that we're going to get a pretty good correction once they see the uh that he's lowering rates.
I think we're going to have a correction into the end of October.
I think it's already started.
We had our first tremors last week.
It's going to get really choppy here.
And I think we're going to chop down.
And then people are going to have to say, hey, we're going to run up hard into the end of the year, Christmas rally, or if he continues to lower interest rates, I think what we'll see here is a move down in October, a rise into the December Fed meeting, and then we'll start falling again into the first quarter of next year.
That's my personal view.
Remember, market main street and Wall Street are two different animals.
And Trump is a populist.
He talks a big game about the stock market, but at the end of the day, he wants his voters employed right happy and most of these people don't own stocks so yeah remember less than 50 percent of the population own stocks but they definitely all have jobs or want jobs and i think that's where he's going to be leaning into going into the midterm how is trump doing do you think oh he's doing great um you know i always bothered
a little bit about it i don't know not so much his rhetoric is probably his tone you know he does need to say some of the things he says but i kind of understand why he does it he has to break through the clutter he has to be the guy on the news.
He has to dominate the news cycle.
So I think he intuitively knows these things.
But look, I think, you know, if we can, let's go around the world here from a geopolitical standpoint.
You know, his end game is the Americans' total focus on China, right?
For him, China is the existential threat to the United States.
I think he basically eliminated Iran as a strategic threat.
He now has Israel and Saudi Arabia that they can play ball now with and play catch with Iran.
They won't need the Americans to the extent that they needed them in the past.
I think some of those assets will move to the western Pacific.
I think he's going to cut a deal with Russia and he's going to make a deal that Putin can't refuse.
You know, Putin, remember, he may talk a big game, but his big worry isn't Europe.
His big worry is China, right?
Because, you know, he has a population that's falling by two or three million a year.
And he's losing a half a million people in a war of his future.
And China is just sitting there saying, hey, we can take half this country.
Okay.
And I think Putin's going to have to pivot to the east to defend himself.
And I think Trump's going to say, hey, look, I can help you share up your defenses.
I can cut deals with you.
I can make you wealthier.
Why are you screwing around with Ukraine?
You know, I'll cut them off, you know, where you guys are already at with the, you know, the Donetsk region, you know, and which was mostly Russian speakers anyway.
And we'll cut a deal with Ukraine, make them feel good about everything.
total focus on China.
Remember, China's our biggest problem.
China is agitating in Brazil.
China's agitating in Venezuela.
China's agitating with Sentinel in Mexico.
Okay.
China's bringing drugs in from Canada.
So it's China, China, China, China.
Or as Trump would say, it's China.
So that's the focus.
And that's the last thing China wants is America 100% focused on China.
I think Trump will cut a deal with Russia and then say, Europe, hey, that's your problem now.
You take care of Ukraine.
I need strategic metals out of Russia.
Russia needs markets.
And I think that's kind of where we are.
And so the BRICS thing is going to be Mox Nix, you know, and from the economic standpoint.
He basically defunded the Democrats, right?
So USAID is gone.
He's getting rid of their illegal voters, right?
He's doing redistricting.
He's leaving nothing to chance.
He's keeping these guys full court press blitzkrieg on them.
They don't know what hit them.
And going into next year, there's going to probably be hundreds of indictments of people for sedition and for treason and for violence.
And they got Bill Poulty sitting in there now and ahead of Fannie Mae.
You know, he's just dialing up mortgage frauds left and right.
You know, these Democrats, they're all playing fast and loose with the law and bill polte is just going to put them all up against the wall and shoot them and so figuratively figuratively but still they won't have money to fund elections they're gonna all that money is going to be legal defense so yeah so the only problem trump has is that he needs to the people need to see that they're getting good jobs and prices are falling how did i'm sorry i'm sorry yeah go
ahead How did tariffs turn out?
We heard about them and then we didn't hear much about it again.
In retrospect, what do you think?
Yeah, that's because they didn't do what the Democrats thought they would do.
Look, you know, the countries that are getting tariffed the most are mercantilist countries.
Okay, so they, they, they, market share is all they, all they care about, you know, and so they're going to eat it.
And they have been eating it.
I think, I think the, I think it's, it's, it's north of 70% of all tariffs have been eaten by the, manufacturer okay and so what and then domestically you know the domestic companies that are overseas they're eating it eggs.
So you can see their margins falling.
And so you have a situation where the American people are still financially very fragile.
And so they're not going to buy if prices go up.
See, people get confused what inflation is.
Inflation isn't rising prices.
Inflation is rising money supply multiplied by the velocity, how fast that money's turning in the economy.
Well, you know, Jerome Powell's been tightening, okay, and velocity has been falling.
People don't have access to credit.
And so they're not buying stuff.
look at mcdonald's mcdonald's is going to lower prices on their food because they were trying to jam up margins right and nobody's buying their stuff so you know i can raise my prices all day long but at some point people say well i don't need it and remember this thing called substitution right hey b prices are out of control well b prices are baked into the inflation thing well people aren't buying beef so you know so there's there's a you know it's it's
simplistic the to think that that people are just going to absorb higher prices people will just defer just like works the other way around you know if you truly believe you know that prices are going rising and you can't earn through it, you just don't buy it.
And then you'll buy things forever.
And I think that's what's happening here.
So tariffs are mocked.
Nix, in fact, it's given Trump probably close to three quarters of a trillion dollars, I think, is going to be the year thing.
But we talked about this before.
He has another ace up his sleeve.
He can reprice the price of gold on the books and gives him another probably three quarters of a trillion dollars into the treasury, you know, as a memo item, they could turn right around and eliminate the three quarters of Treasury debt, or he can turn around and buy, you know, three quarters of a trillion dollars worth of Bitcoin, you know, or whatever, or he can do a combination.
And so he's going to create an environment where he's going to make it look like the deficit's falling.
And, you know, with doji, tariffs, and price of gold.
he could probably cut the deficit half or three quarters next year.
What do you think of Besant?
How's he doing?
Oh, he's the genius behind Trump.
So, you know, I think.
Trump this time learned a lot about himself and he has to surround himself by people he trusts.
Look, he trusts Vance.
He didn't trust, you know, the other guy.
What's that?
Vance, yeah.
The other guy.
That's it right there.
Now, I got to ask you a question, which is nothing to do with anything, but maybe you can help me.
I am fascinated by how sometimes Wall Street doesn't make any sense.
Recently, there is our beloved, those of us who are in the South, we had this thing called Cracker Barrel.
Cracker Barrel was this thing that everybody went to and it was just homespun and corny, whatever.
We're seeing the second version of this ESG, not DEI, but ESG coming in, where in order to to satisfy the BlackRock and the Vanguards, you have to put somebody in there to basically destroy this venerable, okay, institution.
We saw with Bud Light, or now we see this, is that anything to even concern?
Is that ESG Wall Street?
Is that anything of any note or is that just a random case here and there?
Does this lunacy still exist?
No, I think you're getting massive reversals.
I mean, I don't really understand.
I mean, Cracker Barrels, their demographic are people that would puke up ESG.
So yeah, I just caught wind of it this week.
You know, people are making a big deal about their changing the brand image, but I understand that.
So, you know, they're getting rid of the, you know, the old guy on a cracker barrel, right?
So, but basically they're making it more neutral because they may want to pivot.
Now, I don't know any of our other policies or I don't know her personally.
But, you know, if she pushes it beyond that, then I think people just won't eat there.
There's too many choices out there now.
Well, she actually used it before.
See, that's what you said before about beef and, you know, it's like the old joke, my dog doesn't eat meat.
Why?
I don't give it meat, you know, that kind of thing.
So there's other places.
I don't want to spend too much time in that because I always think that this is the civilian speaking versus the Wall Street insider.
I think these people never stop.
I tell people all the time, I said, communists never give up.
They just go back into the shadows until they can come back out again.
I mean, it is literally a mental illness.
And these people are relentless.
Well, let me tell you something.
Here I am in New York City.
We have a, again, I don't want to make this too political.
We have a guy coming up who put it this way.
Even the communists have rejected it as for being too extreme.
So that's something else.
Anyway, from an investment point of view trade with lionel dot com this is great and i think this is fantastic but let me explain to you why bob could it's so important he doesn't you don't invest upon what you like you like trump or or maga it's whatever the situation gives you good bad or indifferent you pivot there's always a deal there's always profit no matter what happens if it goes
up or goes down, you react accordingly.
Explain that.
Yeah, there's always a bull market somewhere.
I try to explain to people, look, in the Great Depression if you'd have just bought the gold miner home state mines, you'd be like, what depression?
Okay.
And it went up the whole time.
And so, and if you look at like what happened in 73 and 74, if you just bought oil and gold, you were rich.
You know, in 2000 and in 2000 um tech collapsed and oil and uranium shot up 2008 we had the finance great financial crisis plt went up 45% when the market went down 45%.
So you're going to have the same thing in this situation.
So what the thing that you have to kind of understand is the why.
You know, so for me, it's going to be either TLT with going to the bond market or if the market is not buying that notion, then you're going to see gold miners, silver miners, Bitcoin, and oil go up.
And so right now we're getting both.
We're getting TLTs moving higher and we're getting gold and silver moving higher.
And then oil, Trump has a mission to kind of drive the price down on that, but energy's been holding up really well.
It's my largest position forever, just because of the cash it flows off.
And so I'm doing just fine with it.
It doesn't move much, but it throws off a lot of cash the way I trade it.
And at the end of the day, all it matters is how much cash you can generate from your investment.
So that's what I see.
That's what I'm looking at going forward.
Either we're going to get financial repression.
which means that inflation is rising higher than the cost of money.
And so they're basically suppressing interest rates.
And then gold and silver and Bitcoin and even oil will like that.
Or we get a full-on recession, and TLT loves that.
So those are the binaries for me.
And I'll probably do a combination of both.
But tech is dead.
What I mean dead is that it went ahead and probably burned itself out again and has to retrench the level of price to earn.
earnings is just absurd i love palantir uh in terms of its growth prospects but not at 100 times sales think about that.
You know, if I told you you had to use your personal money to buy Palantir, you'd be like, oh, no problem, Bob.
No, no, no.
You're going to buy it private.
And the only way you're going to get your cash out is the cash it generates.
Well, your grandchildren would be dead before it would generate enough cash to pay back your investment.
The only reason why it's flying now, it's a public market and it's a game of hot potato.
And so we've seen this movie many, many, many times.
And people are going to learn to speak French because a lot of these stocks are going to Eiffel Tower down.
down meaning is that the angle it went up is the angle it comes down.
And so, um, so you'd be and that's tech.
I mean, it's out of control.
Nvidia out of control.
Palantir out of control.
Facebook out of Meta.
Facebook is that they're they're they're they're playing games on their balance sheet, you know, in terms of of making their earnings look stronger than than it is because they they're under reporting their depreciation expenses.
All this stuff starts coming out when the stock price starts falling.
Now, is it technically illegal?
No.
Is it deceptive?
Absolutely.
And so those guys will get sued., you know, by saying, you know, you put 11-year depreciation expense on chips that are probably going to be obsolete in three years, you know, and so instead of you expensing those and making your earnings look worse, you don't.
And, and, and so you make it look like you beat earnings.
Well, all of a sudden, you know, in six months from now, Meta is going to take this massive charge off, right, to hide everything in one shot.
after the stock's already down 40%.
So you're going to see a lot of that stuff.
A lot of games get played with that.
Nvidia played hide the salami, you know, with the moving stuff to their, to their, their, their, their subsidiary customers.
You look at SMCI, they just basically stacked the books.
That thing blew up.
So there's a lot of games like that being played.
Well, it's very rare that you have somebody who can artfully throw in the term hide the salami.
And I'm laughing.
Only you.
Only you, my friend.
Now, let's get on to brass tax.
Somebody's listening right now and they say, I love this guy, Bob Kudla, and I want to be a part of this.
And I don't know what the hell he's selling.
I don't know what tradewithlinel.com is.
What do I do?
How do I make money?
He knows what the hell he's talking about.
What does somebody do right now, Bob?
Yeah, so we've created a couple of very effective algorithms that help people look for buy signals in the stock market.
And so what we do is that we provide them access to that algorithm.
But more importantly, we also throw trades out every day.
And we put our records out there so people can see how well we do.
And then we also teach you how to trade and we have chat rooms and trading rooms.
Like this whole market's been crazy the last couple weeks.
And if I look at my thing here, if you bear with me one second is that over the last 10 trades we've done here, you know, we were up 12 out of the last 15 trades were green.
And that's typically our average is 66.43% winning trades.
and you know our annualized is 76.28 and so and we've been doing this a long time uh these aren't these aren't hokey trades these aren't brand names that you you would recognize and and so we don't we don't play the penny stock game and and and we rarely day trade mostly our trades are two or three days long and and uh and it's a really good system you know we developed it for ourselves personally and then somebody suggested i should go out and sell it that's what i
did and that's why trade genius was formed but you like it you like the group you know we're all like-minded people so it's a it's a fun environment you can be in a voice room or you can be just in a chat room see that's it you make your money you tell people you don't make money in trades you you make money in selling people information you're not a broker.
That's not your thing.
You tell people what you're doing.
That's the thing.
Unlike a lot of people on CNBC, I want to bring that up.
You're saying, I'm not pushing a stock.
This is how you can be a part of it.
And whatever your entry level is, if you're an experienced trader, if you're brand new, if you don't know anything, you can jump in and it's fun, it's productive, but you're in charge.
You sell people the tools, the methodology, the smarts.
You decide.
That tells me everything.
You're not pushing this.
You're saying, and also, this is what I'm doing, complete transparency and you can talk to people fellow travelers so to speak fellow traders those who are involved at any level there is and that's the most important and that's why people who have told me who have thanked me for turning them on to you bob and it's trade with lionel now if for some reason you for some reason you're old-fashioned i think you should get away from this and you call 800 949 1408 Tell
them that you saw Bob and Lionel speak and you've got deals of plenty, specials to lure, to entice, again, to teach you not to sell you some stock, but to teach you how to enjoy this incredible, this I think very profitable, not roller coaster, but amusement park called investing.
That's about it, I think.
Yeah.
And I think, you know, we do find in all markets, but what we find is that when things are going well, people say, oh, I don't really need anybody.
But when things go haywire, then people find out our true value.
And, you know, we're not myopic at all.
I mean, you know.
I'm a cheerleader.
I'm not a Bitcoin cheerleader.
I'm not a gold cheerleader.
You know, I'm a making money cheerleader.
And if I think Bitcoin's going to fall, I tell people it's going to fall.
I don't care if I hurt people's feelings.
Right.
Exactly.
I tell people I think it's going to fall.
Oil, I'm heavily invested in energy.
But if I think it's going to fall, I tell people it's going to fall and vice versa.
And what we charge for service is nothing compared to what you get out of it.
It's nothing peanuts.
And, you know, we make enough money.
We do well.
And, and, and, and look.
I'm trading alongside you.
You know, probably 80% of the trades I put out there for you guys, you know, in the room, I'm taking personally.
So I can't take them all.
I just have to put trades out every day, you know, for people because that's the service.
service but but I'm trading right next to you guys so it's we're we're aligned.
Well, Bob could, it's trade with Lionel.
Remember, a trade union is your company, but trade with Lionel is how you help us and how you get the deals that have been specially crafted and tailored for us and the Lionel Nation listenership or call 800 949 1408 800 949 1408.
And Bob, it's always a pleasure.
I learn so much.
You will say something.
You will pull something.
One day you'll say, you know, helium is a helium.
I didn't know there was a helium.
I'm just making that up.
Cardboard is Luke.
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