Financial innovation is now a Fed problem

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
This is InvestTalk from KPP Financial, helping investors make sense of the markets one day at a time. Here's your host, Justin Klein.

**Justin Klein** (0:15)
Good afternoon, fellow investors, and welcome back to InvestTalk. This is our Friday. We made it to Friday, August 21st, 2026 edition of InvestTalk, and we have an exciting show for you today. We're going to talk all about how this market reacted this week. It was quite the week.
Some big headlines, some big moves, especially in gold, which we'll talk about a little bit later. I've been talking about hammering. I've been pounding the table for the last three, four years now, but some people listen to me, some people haven't, but it's never too late. We're going to talk about that and much, much more during this hour. Most importantly will be your live calls, your questions, 888-99-CHARIS, how to get through and ask your question on every InvestTalk or after hours, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you can leave your message. We'll answer it on a future show. We have some topics that we'll bring that I think are great, but most importantly, like I said, whatever's on your mind, we are here for it. So let's close out the week strong. Now in just a bit, we'll talk about today's stock performance and run down the show topics for the hour. But as usual, we'll tackle this first call question now.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:31)
Hello, InvestTalk. I had a question on ETF, GDX.
It's gold miners. From my understanding, it's not invested in gold. It's basically, it owns the miners that probably produce gold. So I was wondering if that's a good exposure to gold. I have none in my portfolio and was looking to get into some. And if I do, I was looking to sell some cash secure puts to see if I get assigned. Wanted to know what you guys thought about GDX. Thank you.

**Justin Klein** (2:02)
Yeah, this kind of links with what I said before, which is you should own gold. We own it through the miners. We buy individual miners. But if you don't want to do the research, you want to just own some of the large miners that are out there. This is a good collection of them. The top holding is Agnico Eagle, then Newmont, Barrick, Weed and Precious Metals, Franco-Nevada is in there, Kinross Gold, some of the bigger names with market caps in the tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars. So yes, I think this is a good way to get exposure. Especially if you have none. Now, should you do cash secured puts? Well, the issue with that is that you may not get a sign unless there's a large pullback in gold and gold miners, which certainly can happen. We've had a good run as of late. We had support back in July, early July. What do we bottom out at? About $70 per share. Now, we're already up to 102 and change. And that's just in the past few weeks. So it's a little bit overbought in the short term. Would like to see a bit more, bit of volatility, a bit of pullback just to get back in. But once again, are you going to get put it exactly? I don't know if that's really going to happen. So I think adding cash accrued puts is not a bad idea, but I wouldn't use that as a sole way to get in because you may not get assigned. And yeah, you'll keep a little of that premium on the put, but you want upside. That's what this is about. There's a lot of volatility. You have to know that. You have to know that volatility is the name of the game.
In the gold miner world, any of the commodity stocks, they have high volatility. You have to be comfortable with that. But in an environment like this, where debasement is the name of the game of our financial system, there's the right tail of that volatility that is being experienced right now. And the right tail is the positive outcome. Most people when they hear volatility, they think left tail, they think negative, but this is the right tail and things are looking up for the space.
They had a great show yesterday. Luke looked into the dollar slide and saw what it does to your foreign holdings. He explained why currency moves quietly drive a large share of international fund returns and whether hedge or unhedge exposure makes more sense. He also answered a question about Zoetis, ZTS, and if you have, have an omission, go check it out. You can get every InvestTalk podcast wherever you get your podcast. There will be a lot of ground to cover over the next 45 minutes or so in time permitting. We'll get to all of it. The main focus point is Jackson Hole. The symposium coming up here in, what, about a week? Is about the dynamics of the treasury market.