The Worst Holiday Purchases for My Daughter... and Our 10 Biggest Market Outlooks for 2025

Dear Fellow Expat:

Mistakes were made.

Two days after Christmas, I instantly regretted the handful of gifts our family gave Amelia.

Today, I want to briefly count those down… before getting to a more critical list of the markets for 2025… (Our “10 Biggest” Market Thoughts for 2025.)

Let’s get to it.

Worst Gift No. 5 - Pop It Electronic Game

We didn’t get this one for her.

So, thank you to whoever did this to us.

This is a memory game, I think.

No clue. We’ve smartly ensured that there are no batteries in the house, so we don’t have to listen to it. This looks like it makes a lot of beeping sounds, and the box says it has a speaker, which makes me very cautious.

Without batteries, it only makes clicking and snapping sounds.

It sounds like a device a coworker uses to calm down from their anxiety, except, it also makes everyone else in the office want to run out the window.

This box says that it was made in China, and I believe it.

I’m worried that whatever is in this plastic will melt and somehow end up in the local water supply when it breaks or is thrown out in the Spring.

Then, we’ll hear the same crackling sounds in our minds for the rest of our lives.

Rating: One Star, because that’s all you’ll be able to see when the plastic fires start at the nearby landfills from similar products dumped by similar parents.

Worst Gift No. 4 - The National Geographic Marble Run

I’m listening to my wife lose it while the marble run tower and plastic fall apart on a carpet downstairs. This is live reporting… about the National Geographic Marble Run.

National Geographic, which I thought was a prestigious institution until now, gives you 150 plastic (of course) pieces to construct these marble towers.

You’re supposed to design these tall towers and then place the marbles into these shoots.

You’ll notice that no kids are playing with it on the box.

If you squint, a kid is sitting in the bottom right corner of the box, presumably waiting to play with the marble run but explicitly not playing with the marble run.

There’s a reason for that: I’m not sure anyone ever gets to play with it.

This is supposed to be fun.

But it has all the stress and time-suck of a Time Share presentation.

And you’ll probably want to schedule that couple’s therapy for next week.

It turns out it’s a 6th-grade architecture project from hell because finding the piece to match four towers' height is tough.

You think they’re all different colors of different heights to make it easy… but you’ll discover that you’re actually color blind.

Good luck telling the difference between “green and blue” or “red and orange” pieces.

Then there’s the tricky part about stability.

The taller it goes, the more unable it is, and any pressure sends the entire marble tower crashing into the ground and back into a heap of 150 pieces.

While you’re putting it together and trying to make it stand up, your impatient child keeps firing marbles down the incomplete run, which is a great sound to hear repeatedly, and you’ll get hit with a marble in the face at least three times.

At the same time, you test the bounds of your terrible engineering prowess and parental patience.

It’s the little things that bother us as adults.

Imagine a loving mother trying to construct a kid's toy, only to watch her 15 minutes of work crash into a plastic heap. The child gets defensive and preemptively screams, “I didn’t mean to do it,” and runs upstairs.

Seems like a great bonding experience.

Rating: One star… It would be two stars if it came with a prescription for Xanax.

Worst Gift No. 3 - Topps Chrome Update 2024 (Breakers Delight)

This gift was more for me, but Amelia likes cards, so I paid some money for us.

This is more or less a lottery ticket for baseball cards, as I am fascinated by the ongoing search for the Paul Skenes card.

Long story short, they sell these boxes for $300 (they’re going for $800 on the secondary markets. I bought two just about the retail price when they came out, so we opened one and are selling the other on eBay.

I just hope the Skenes card isn’t in the one we will sell.

This is a bad product. You get… seriously… 12 cards. The same number of “hits” or “great cards” that you’d get in a bigger box of 100 cards.

So, they selling the “rare cards."

They guarantee “great cards” with autographs and rarities and two autographs.

The problem is that the first autograph is of… Jorge Barrosa.

Who is that?

The other autograph is a guy on the Washington Nationals. I didn’t even bother looking.

It was fun for about 15 seconds… but you’re better off asking your mailman for his autograph. That might be worth more in the long run.

It’s just a reminder for anyone in this hobby: For any baseball cards that were made in the post-2015 period, you should buy the cards you want online or at a convention.

If you want Paul Skenes's autograph, just buy that instead.

Don’t buy a lottery ticket.

At least I’ll break even selling this other box on eBay this afternoon.

Rating: One Half Baseball Card, Ripped in Half. I should have played Powerball.

Worst Gift No. 2 - The Toy Beauty Car

I’m unsure if Amelia asked Santa for a Barbie remote control car.

But this ain’t the premium brand.

It’s some sort of knockoff from Vietnam.

The remote control barely works. My daughter doesn’t have excellent motor skills yet, so this stupid thing bangs into walls all day in my house.

Yesterday, I told her not to drive it too close to the steps, or it might tumble down and break. The reason was that I thought that this was worth more.

But you can buy it for $9.99. Yes, for under $10, you too can listen to the mechanical gears of this creaky toy accelerate and crash into the legs of your dogs.

No rational person wants this. Only the dolls look happy. But they secretly wish they were Pop It Electric Game toys instead of dollars from the same plastic.

The good news is that she’ll get tired of this thing fast anyway, so it wasn’t worth springing the… holy cow… extra $40 for the real thing at Walmart?

Rating: Half a Star, and I look forward to stepping on it and hurting myself.

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Worst Gift No. 1 - Sonic the Hedgehog Walkie Talkies

Okay.

This isn’t even close.

But a little backstory on this one.

The biggest pet peeve in my house is that I cannot stand when my daughter and wife YELL ACROSS THREE FLOORS to one another in a townhouse.

“Mommy, where are you?” she screams.

When you’re writing like I do every day… and people suddenly start shouting… and you shout BACK at them to “STOP YELLING… somehow, you’re the problem.

So, while picking up my prescription at a local grocery store, I saw these things.

I thought, “Why not get them walkie-talkies?”

Pure impulse buy.

I will never forgive myself for this. This can’t be unresolved in therapy.

There is cheap plastic crap from China.

And then there’s this.

President Trump’s first order should be to put a 15,000% tariff on these things.

Here’s why.

First, my daughter has no understanding of how walkie-talkies work.

So she screams into them (instead of whispering.)

Second, there’s no volume control on these devices.

Third, you can’t understand anything someone says on one of these two, making the whole experience loud - and like you’re listening to the teacher from Charlie Brown…

Fourth, my daughter doesn’t understand that you must say “OVER” when you are finished talking… so she asks a question, keeps talking… and then screams, “What!?” back into the device 10 seconds later.

We used them last night while I was walking the dogs. She was inside, and her “What?” screams radiated into the neighborhood's dark parking lots.

Finally, the most frequent thing my daughter yells into the walkie-talkie is very familiar…

“MOMMY, WHERE ARE YOU?”

This means I hear “Mommy, where are you?” bouncing across the walls from Amelia on the top floor of my house and through the garbled walkie-talkie on the main floor at a somehow scientifically impossible louder level.

So… everyone… Let’s go back to screaming across the house at each other.

This was a horrible purchase, and may God have mercy on my soul.

Rating: Zero Stars. Just Darkness, Defined. It’s Perfectly Night.

Okay… now that I have that out of the way…

And I’ve recovered…

How about some stock market analysis?

Here’s our outlook for 2025.

Our “10 Biggest” for 2025

The following is a sample of Republic Risk readers for our 2025 Outlook that arrives early next week. Let’s talk about what’s on our radar for the year ahead.

Our Biggest Catalyst: Electricity Demand

It’s no secret.

AI Electricity demand will continue to swell, setting the stage for higher prices across the United States. This will impact utilities, and we anticipate an electricity trading market emerging by the 2030s.

With U.S. debt surging and inflation sticky, it’s a fair bet to expect electricity prices to outpace CPI as it has done for decades.

Our Biggest Hope: A Breakthrough on Cancer Arrives

This feels like it’s coming and will likely arrive in the form of mRNA drugs that aim to identify and attack cancer cells.

It might be hard to get some people over the wall first on a vaccine, but there’s a possibility that 2025 is the year that this breakthrough arrives, and that makes the GLP-1 movement look like a speed bump.

Our Biggest D.C. Problem: “Judicial” Gridlock Disrupts Deregulation

On the way out the door, Democrats sent hundreds of new judges to Federal benches and then bragged it was their last hope to stop a “MAGA Revolution.”

In an era when deregulation is sorely needed, political-activist judges threaten common-sense solutions to address the urgent need for energy, military, electricity, and mining infrastructure.

Yes, the national debt is a serious problem. We must cut spending and slash regulations to spur economic growth and domestic investment.

Full stop.

Our Biggest Wildcard: MicroStrategy’s Inclusion in the QQQ

Michael Saylor’s company, MicroStrategy (MSTR), has reached the NASDAQ 100.

Now, what will happen?

Will it suck up passive investment capital, fueling a positive feedback loop that sends Bitcoin and MSTR stock surging?

Could it create a liquidity crisis all by itself? We are in uncharted territory with the financial engineering of Saylor and his war against the U.S. dollar and fiat currencies.

If the Nasdaq is the Mediterranean Sea of Capital, the S&P 500 is the Pacific Ocean.

Should MSTR reach the S&P 500, all bets are off on how much passive capital it could suck into its stock. In an era of Federal Reserve intervention, some already worry that MicroStrategy could become “Too Big to Fail.”

Our Biggest Question: Could the Fed Conduct QE in 2025?

On LinkedIn, self-appointed financial experts have entirely dismissed the idea that the Federal Reserve will engage in any form of Quantitative Easing.

However, suppose China engages in its own massive stimulus to shore up its economy and the U.S. dollar grows too strong.

In that case, the possibility of the next program might not exclusively be named QE. However, it will be im’, it will be implemented to achieve QE-like outcomes.

Moreover, the prospect of QE is primarily based on the cat-and-mouse game that the People’s Bank of China and the Federal Reserve play.

The other wild card is that QE becomes necessary because of widespread damage caused by tariffs and a slowdown in the global economy. A mixture of weak economic data could force the Fed’s hand or make them engage in widespread fiscal repression to drive down the price of near-term bonds to entice long-term investment.

Our Biggest Expectation: Crypto Consolidation Begins in Earnest

The Cantor Fitzgerald Cryptocurrency Conference in Miami in 2024 confirmed institutional capture in crypto.

With M&A as a core theme of 2025 across various sectors, it’s widely expected by industry analysts and us that consolidation will take us from 20 to 5 miners, eventually bringing us into an oligopoly.

Our Biggest Contrarian Opportunity: U.S./Mexico Energy Infrastructure

There’s still something brewing South of the Border. Carlos Slim continues to buy shares of PBF Energy, and Mexico is desperate to upgrade its aging oil and gas infrastructure through privatization. Oil will continue to face pressure in 2025 without efforts by China to either fix its economy’s structure or do what they do best: Print money. But refining assets are still cheap, and demand isn’t going away.

Our Biggest Fear (Grey Swan): The Refinancing Crisis Is Worse Than Expected

The United States must refinance more than $10 trillion in the next 18 months, and that’s on top of a refinancing problem for many private sector players. The wall of debt, primarily fueled by Janet Yellen’s activities in recent years, has sabotaged the incoming Treasury Secretary.

There’s a reason we anticipate the Fed buying up short-term bonds at a massive rate: to stimulate demand for long-term yields. Otherwise, the sale of 20-year and 30-year bonds could hit major roadblocks as yields likely rise and mortgage rates follow. This could get ugly quickly.

We’re better off if we got a recession. But stagflation is the likelier outcome.

Our Biggest Blind Spot: Fed Inflation Policy

If people believe that U.S. inflation is just 2.5%, we have a bridge to sell them…

Forget that because the bridge will only increase in value due to inflation.

Remember one important thing about the Federal Reserve. It lies through omission.

In the early 1990s, the Federal Reserve began a process known as “Inflation Targeting” - an effort to drive inflation to a specific target to spur economic activity. That said, the Fed never officially said it had a particular target.

The Fed reportedly chose 2% as the official target in 1996 but did not tell anyone about it until 2012.

With inflation sticky, is it possible that the Fed has adopted the advice of economists hostile to a fixed number and instead chose 3%?

It’s possible, and it could have dramatic impacts moving forward.

Higher inflation passes through the balance sheets of companies with low debt and strong economic moats. In addition, monetary inflation acts as a multiplier on the costs of things that matter in housing, food, energy, electricity, and education.

Finally, there’s gold, which will continue to shine in the year ahead - less any short-term liquidity issues at home.

Our Biggest Industry Bet: Community Banking M&A

You don’t need me to tell you twice: Listen to Tim.

The banks will merge, and any weakness in the coming months will add more fodder for other banks that need deposits. There’s so much pent-up demand for M&A next year that this trend could explode in 2025.

Again, we’ll discuss many of these trends in our report, which arrives on Tuesday for Republic Risk readers. A new Quality portfolio will follow on January 2.

Stay positive,

Garrett Baldwin

Secretary of Bad Holiday Purchases