It’s always a good idea to keep some of your money in cash in case of emergencies.

For example, if you put your money in a money market fund paying +4% and the S&P 500 drops just 5% – that’s a 9% positive swing in your favor.

It’s also vital that you understand how to invest.

Not just the strategies and tactics that go into identifying winning trades, but the underlying tenets that define a successful investor. These principles are the foundation on which my own successful investing career was founded. And I still preach them to this day. So much so that we took those ideas and compiled them into reports for our readers.

Once you understand these vital concepts, you can start to thrive in any environment by focusing on the right vehicles.

If finding profitable short and long term investments with limited risk was easy, everyone would be a winner.

There’s a science to identifying winning trades. It’s one that my team and I have executed to the highest level over the last three decades. We’ve done so thanks to a proprietary strategy that combines fundamental and technical analysis through a macro lens to identify clear opportunities.

Here are a few of the biggest opportunities our team has identified moving forward, with a full report on each that you can get access to.

Together, they can help you:

But the time to take action is now.

You’ve just discovered some very important but very difficult truths.

This information is the kind of data my team and I have researched and collected for decades.

And we’ve been sharing that information in a private investor group called The Essential Investor.

Today, I’d like to invite you to become an Essential Investor, and claim more than $1,300 in free bonuses when you join.

In our private member forum, we provide:

Wait … a BANK as the first example of a stock worth buying in the middle of a report on a banking crisis?!

Well, as I said – we go far beyond the surface to identify opportunities, and Charles Schwab is indeed a great opportunity. The only one within the banking sector in my opinion.

SCHW is an oversold stock, and we’re buying at up to $58 share price.

Our team would consider them pretty close to a blue chip bank. Dare we say a flight to safety.

They don’t make outrageous claims. And they don’t do a lot about outrageous investing. They are just getting punished by the media and the market acting out of fear.

The Schwab stock price fell off a cliff. But nothing had changed at the bank. Nothing had changed with the trading platform.

What did change—and has been changing—was the Fed’s dramatic effort to fight inflation by raising interest rates at an historic pace. This increased the attractive returns “money markets” will pay.

Individual investors who’d been trading on the Schwab platform… and those who’d given Schwab their money to be managed in one of the Schwab funds… started pulling their money out, seeking higher returns in money market accounts.

Big institutional bankers took notice. They started dumping Schwab stock. The stock dropped nearly 40% in a matter of days.

But that’s what makes this case “curious.”

Schwab has a $90 billion market cap. But it was—is—being treated like a regional bank, subject to volatile rates, and investors chasing higher returns elsewhere.

Schwab is a victim of the digital era of crowds. And when that happens, stocks can drop very quickly because, again, people are hitting the sell at any price button and a stock will drop to a place that’s just unreasonable compared to the overall value of this company.

It happens fairly quickly.

And the pullback has opened up a new avenue for Schwab in the next three to six months.

Now, you have to be careful in situations like this because the other side of an oversold stock is sometimes called a “falling knife”.

As always, you never want “to catch a falling knife” because you can cut your hand. It’s better to wait for a stock that’s oversold to kind of show some level of strength or at least some level of stability before stepping in and buying it.

Do your due diligence. Look carefully at the fundamentals of the company. Ask, “how much should this company actually be worth?” And then once the situation stabilizes, that’s typically when it’s a much better time to step in and start to buy.

Overall, now is an excellent time to buy and hold physical gold. But there’s also the Spider Gold Trust, which has been a positive position for us, and could see a significant return moving forward.

Right now, gold is trending higher. We’ve seen gold actually cross above the $2,000 per ounce mark and could see $3,000 by the end of the year.

There’s a lot of firepower and a lot of tailwinds behind gold right now. Part of the reason people are enjoying investing in gold and why this is so attractive right now is because of inflation, which is poised to continue rising hire as the banking crisis adds fuel to the inflationary fires.

Gold tends to hold its value over a long period of time despite the fact that the value of the dollar is declining. So if the value of the dollar is declining, it means it takes more of these weak dollars to buy an ounce of gold. And we have seen the dollar pull back both in absolute terms and also compared to other currencies. The more you print, the more debt the US goes into, the more potential there is for the dollar to be devalued. So gold is a good hedge against that.

GDXJ is another fund that invests in gold mining companies. So this is a play that follows the same theme, but is much more aggressive.

The same move in gold price can lead to significantly more profit in GDXJ because it’s made up of a variety of junior miners. And part of the reason that GDXJ has done so well is because junior miners (small mines that are beginning the process of developing and actually starting to pull gold out of the ground) often run at a loss in the early stages of their businesses because there’s just so much input that has to go into creating a mine:

But as gold starts to move higher, these junior miners can go from actually losing money to making a profit just because gold went from $1,900 announced to $2,100 announced. And we know as investors, there’s a huge difference between owning a company that actually generates a profit versus owning a company that makes a small loss. And so as these small gold miners turn that corner and become more profitable, the stocks that are included in GDXJ have the potential to shoot significantly higher.

Intuitive Surgical is one of my favorite picks right now in the medical device area.

Medical devices are doing well right now because so many people stayed away from hospitals during COVID that really needed either an implant done or some kind of elective surgery, but an important elective surgery. And now that COVID is less of a risk, people are going back in and getting these procedures done.

Intuitive Surgical has a very unique platform where they do robotic surgeries and install a base of very expensive robot system, and that costs a lot of money, and the company makes a ton of profit from that system going in.

But the really exciting thing is that once that system is in and they’re putting them in hundreds of hospitals throughout the country, then there are consumables that are used every time that system does a surgery.

Intuitive Surgical then provides all of those consumable products that are used with that robotic surgery. So they have an installed base that continues to generate revenue week after week and month after month. Now that China is opening up following their archaic lockdowns, we’re actually seeing Intuitive Surgical business pick up in China as well.

We foresee this trend continuing, making ISRG a very attractive buy.

Valero is an energy refiner, turning oil into gasoline, jet fuel, diesel and so forth.

The bet we’re making on VLO is a play on the spread between what it costs Valero to buy oil and what Valero is being paid to sell refined products. This is what’s known as “a crack spread,” essentially the difference in price between what you can sell the jet fuel, gasoline, diesel, at, and what you have to pay for the actual crude oil that you buy.

We look at it as built in arbitrage.

Spread between those two is the profit that you can make for every single barrel of oil. Those crack spreads have been very wide recently just because we’re seeing very high demand for diesel and jet fuel, and there have been low inventories, which makes people worried about shortages.

This naturally drives prices higher. Meanwhile, oil has been low. We’ve recently seen a little bit of a rebound in oil, a trend which may continue, but oil prices or the input prices for Valero have been relatively low, whereas their profit from selling refined products has been higher.

In addition to just having a very profitable business, Valero actually pays a great dividend because of this reliable practice. That dividend helps the company to hold value or the stock to hold value in good times and bad, because investors know that they will get paid from this company’s profit spreads.