What I see this morning …
It is 9:30 in the morning. I am giving some thought to the foreign exchange markets. The American market should be open now. Over the weekend, gold and silver markets took a beating as prices on gold and silver fell. These falls in prices did not take me by surprise. Prices fall and rise and traders will take some profit off of the table.
What is not taking me by surprise is the fall-off in the tech sector market. If you follow YouTube, prognosticators are making noise about the number of layoffs occurring in the labor markets. The 1.1 million number from last year is mentioned a lot. There is nary any mention of the approximately 600,000 people that were hired during that same period. For me, while that number gives a more complete picture of the labor market, in the end, 500,000 people were looking for work.
Like you, I have been looking at these YouTube videos and have been wondering what type of resources do these fired individuals have? I have no numbers (yet) to go on, but I would say these people either have well-to-do parents and/or savings. These resources give these people the time to get onto YouTube and talk about how bad of a day they are having. The real job hunters are not on YouTube, preferring to work the one, two, or three jobs necessary for them to survive. I would take what you see on YouTube with a grain of salt.
What am I telling my clients …
Like you, my clients are concerned about their next moves. You should be ten to twenty years ahead of what you are seeing today. You should position yourself solely on what you are seeing in the media. The media you are seeing is designed to tell people where to go. You should already know where to go and how to get there. If you don’t then public-facing media will not get you there.
What public-facing media tells you is how the majority of people reading or hearing what they see and hear in public media are digesting and hearing the news. The media’s job is to keep at bay the majority of its consumers’ behavior toward your positions. The media should also provide you with an idea as to where the majority of media’s consumers are going so that you can, in most cases, do the opposite.
The majority should not interfere with your positioning. The media should be moving the majority away from your position.
Alton Drew
2 February 2026
Lawyers Write the Bets. Bankers Sell the Bets. 