Jimmy Mengel,
Director of Customer Experience
Jan. 9, 2026
“This is not about persuasion: This is about disorientation.”
—Steve Bannon
Flood the zone.
When Donald Trump became president, “flooding the zone” was the central thesis to implementing his agenda. It presupposes (correctly) that the media will relentlessly cover every wild claim, every click-worthy move and prove once and for all that we peasants can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.
Facts become a vacuous echo-chamber that works like a global game of telephone: by the time you get to the end of the call, the message has become so garbled that nobody knows where the conversation even started.
This theory works perfectly for all of the powers that be – political power, media power, financial power – regardless of party or parlance.
It’s basically Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard's "dizziness of freedom" (we’ll get to the Danes and Greenland in short order). When you have boundless possibilities it creates a wild sense of anxiety and confusion.
By providing the public with too many balls to juggle they’ll inevitably begin to drop them, give up and say “Heck, we’re at the circus anyway, better to just sit back and watch the clowns”.
It’s been wildly effective. Just look at where we are just one week into the new year…
A Year in a Week
A shocking midnight raid to capture the sitting President of a sovereign nation? Check. A blindfolded dictator in a tracksuit whisked away to New York City? Check. All the Hollywood glitter and glam to take over the news cycle? Double-check.
Before Nicolas Maduro even hit the courtroom, online influencers had identified the Nike Tech sweatsuit he was wearing and turned it into a viral fashion phenomenon. As of Monday morning the fleece zip-up jacket that Maduro was wearing sold out on Nike's website. Talk about burying the lede.
Before our collective heads could stop spinning, Mr. Trump doubled down by saying the quiet part out loud: “We’re going to take their oil.”
That sent oil prices yo-yoing for several days afterwards as investors tried to parse what that meant. The sitting President is now taking charge of the world’s largest oil supply? What does that mean?
Shares of Chevron – the only U.S. energy company allowed to operate in Venezuela – soared up to 10% in pre-market trading. Industry stalwarts like Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips jumped 4%.
Then they dropped a few percentage points. Yesterday they went up a little more. Rinse and repeat.
Once that quick news cycle was sufficiently flooded, the wife of Trump’s Rasputin Steven Miller tweeted this:
Forget Venezuela, look over here! Now we’re taking over Greenland!
Investors quickly pounced on the idea that we would be doing the same thing in Greenland that we did in Venezuela – stamp our flag and take hold of the country’s most precious resource: critical minerals.
As R360 founder Charlie Garcia aptly put it:
“Greenland's mineral mix reads like a defense contractor's Christmas list.
Why does this matter to your investment portfolio? Because Greenland possesses 39 of the 50 minerals the United States has classified as critical to national security.
If that sentence doesn't get your attention, you're not paying attention.”
The problem, financially, is you have to be paying attention to what actually matters…
Taking the ‘Re’ Out of Reacting
The takeaway here isn’t to buy oil stocks, rare earth metals or Nike track suits.
Venezuelan oil won’t significantly move the needle on oil prices for years. We’ll need those years to update infrastructure, divvy out contracts and – oh yeah – install a brand new government that bends to every whim of the U.S.
Good luck playing that in your portfolio every week.
As for Greenland, no major Greenland mine will reach production during Trump’s term or even the next one or two.
According to a recent Harvard study, seven of eight proposed Greenland investments have failed. The permitting is labyrinthian, the politics are unpredictable and neodymium, dysprosium and terbium don’t exactly jump off the tongues of CNBC anchors.
Even the early conquistadors had their share of hardship before hauling back their treasure.
Here’s the key investing takeaway from all of this smoke-and-mirrors routine: be proactive, not reactive. You need to foresee events like these and position yourself accordingly.
That’s what we do here at Digest Publishing. Our editors have already carved out their zones well beyond the floodwaters. Not right, not left, and certainly not sideways. In a flood the only way to go is up.
We’re prepared for sideshows like we’ve been witnessing.
They’ve positioned themselves and their readers to prosper outside the day-to-day circus.
In yesterday’s Bizarro World, Nick and Gerardo tight-roped their way across all of this week's insane news and translated it directly into actionable investment advice. It was quite a sight to behold. You can watch it yourself right here.
While the world is in chaos, the markets have been a joy for us.
- Gold is at $4,500
- Silver is at $80
- Copper hit an all-time high
- Lithium is 70% off the bottom
Our portfolios have responded with dozens of triple-digit winners – too many to list here.
Nick created his own zone on 40 gorgeous acres in Washington State. Gerardo floods his zone by jumping into his Olympic-sized swimming pool and counting his blessings between back strokes in Texas.
Our readers? You’re creating your own flood-proof zones as we speak.
I’ve spoken with so many members that now live in sailboats, fly their own planes and build their own homes in far-reaching places across the globe.
How? They acted instead of reacting.
Do yourself a favor and join us in the flood-free zone, each and every week…
The five free stock picks should make it well worth your while.
Godspeed,
Jimmy Mengel
Director of Customer Experience, Daily Profit Cycle