Sooo, it happened – the Trump-backed DeFi project, World Liberty Financial, unleashed its token, WLFI, onto the open market.

It hit major exchanges like Binance, Kraken, Bybit, and OKX yesterday.

And it came with a bang. The price doubled instantly, the market cap hit nearly $10B at one point, and WLFI briefly became the #20 biggest crypto in the world.

… before it crashed.

The token’s now ~50% lower than its all-time high, and the market cap’s down by $3B.

WLFI was pitched as a governance token last year – the idea being that holders could vote on how the platform evolves.

Cool cool. Except… the ownership is super top-heavy:

Team & advisors control ~33.5% of the total supply

Roughly a third of the supply is locked up with the people who built and promoted the project.

Treasury → ~20%

Another big slice went into a treasury controlled by World Liberty Financial itself – again, not in circulation.

The Trump fam → 22% – 24%

Filings and media reports say that roughly a quarter of the entire token supply is linked directly to the Trump family. At launch, that alone was worth billions on paper.

Put together, insiders control ~70% of all WLFI. For everyday holders, that means two things:

1. When insiders sell, retail can do little but watch the charts bleed;

2. Governance is more illusion than reality. The token may be marketed as community-driven, but insiders control enough supply to push through any decision they agree on.

Ay, and wouldn’t you know it, there’s already a major proposal up for a vote.

In response to the crash, World Liberty Financial introduced a new governance plan we like to call burn, baby, burn.

The idea: use 100% of the fees earned from WLFI’s protocol-owned liquidity (aka POL) to buy WLFI on the open market – then burn it.

This means those tokens would get sent to a “dead wallet” – gone forever, never tradable again.

… “Lmao, ok, but why?” Glad you asked:

Reduce supply → fewer tokens = more scarcity.

Support the price → regular buybacks create buying pressure, which can stabilize or increase prices.

Reward holders → as supply goes down, each remaining WLFI becomes slightly more valuable.

So yeah, a buyback-and-burn can help stabilize the price and make the token look more appealing – if people actually use the platform and those fees keep coming in.

But it won’t fix the centralization problem, and it won’t clean up WLFI’s reputation (which isn’t at its best state rn – the mood seems to lean more skeptical than supportive online).

… Unless they plan to burn the doubts as well? To be continued.

Now you’re in the know. But think about your friends – they probably have no idea. I wonder who could fix that… Spread the word and be the hero you know you are!

Redwire (RDW -9.17%) stock, a specialist in building infrastructure in space, just won a NASA contract of unspecified value, to “facilitate a Space Microalgae biotechnology experiment” that will be carried to the International Space Station aboard the upcoming Axiom Mission 4.

Redwire stock is not up on the news, however, but rather down a staggering 9.8% through 2:20 p.m. ET. But here’s the thing: Redwire’s sell-off is not because of the new NASA contract; it’s in spite of it.

Redwire + green algae = a 10% loss?

“The Space Microalgae investigation will analyze the impact of microgravity on the growth, metabolism, and genetic activity of three strains of edible microalgae,” explains Redwire, “which researchers are assessing as a potential sustainable food source for long-duration space missions.” So far, so good.

Even not knowing how much Redwire will make off the contract, this development could facilitate future missions to the moon, to Mars, and beyond — great news for anyone involved in space investing.

Is Redwire stock a sell?

The problem isn’t with the NASA contract, but with Redwire stock itself.

Over the past year, Redwire stock more than tripled in price. Valued at $1.5 billion today, the company has no profits, and less than $280 million in revenue, meaning the stock carries a price-to-sales ratio of more than 5.3. That’s versus my estimate profitless space stocks should sell for no more than 2 to 4 times trailing sales — and versus the mere 1.4 times sales that Redwire stock cost just one year ago.

Back in June 2024, I highlighted Redwire’s low cost as a key indicator it was time to buy the stock. Redwire’s a three-bagger now (so yes, I was right about that). At 5.3 times sales, however, Redwire stock’s become a lot more expensive. It’s probably time to sell.

Rich Smith has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Canopy Growth (CGC -21.05%) stock collapsed in morning trading Friday, down 20.5% through 11 a.m. ET after the company reported a comically bad earnings miss.

Heading into today’s report, analysts forecast the Canadian cannabis company would lose $0.20 per share in its fourth quarter of fiscal 2025. Instead, Canopy Growth reported a loss of (better sit down for this) $1.32 per share.

Canopy Growth’s gigantic Q4 miss

Investors were not amused.

Canopy management tried to put a brave face on the results, leading off its report by noting Canadian sales, at least, grew 4% year over year, and Canadian medical cannabis sales in particular grew 13%. CEO Luc Mongeau noted further that he has taken “decisive actions to accelerate growth and profitability by unifying our medical cannabis businesses globally” (even though he highlighted cannabis sales in Canada separately).

He also argued Canopy has made “marked year-over-year improvement in Adjusted EBITDA and cash flow in FY2025,” and remains “committed to achieving positive Adjusted EBITDA in the near-term and positive Free Cash Flow over time.”

But Canopy is not there yet.

Is Canopy Growth stock a sell?

Globally, Canopy’s sales fell 11% in Q4, and free cash flow was negative $36.2 million. For the full year, sales were down 9% and FCF was negative $176.6 million.

Viewed in the most favorable light, therefore, one could argue that at least cash burn is decelerating at Canopy (four quarters of $36.2 million cash burn would imply a FCF run rate of only negative $144.8 million). But sales growth is still negative, and it got even more negative in the year’s final quarter.

Sorry, folks. I just can’t find a reason to want to own Canopy Growth stock until this trend improves.

Rich Smith has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Wall Street’s rare-metal rumour mill began on a freezing January morning at Zurich Airport, where cargo handlers wrestled two-ton pallets of 99.5% pure gold onto a chartered 747 bound for New York.

Their destination was a COMEX vault in the city, where warehouse rules hinge not on purity but bar dimensions. The gold came from London vaults, cast in 400-ounce formats that satisfied one market’s conventions but failed another’s.

Before it could settle futures contracts in the U.S., the metal had to pass through Swiss furnaces, where it was liquefied and reshaped into 100-ounce or kilobar form.

Each freshly poured block triggered a new customs declaration on arrival, flagged under HS code 7115900530, “finished metal shapes of gold.” There was no change in ownership, no added value, just reformatting in motion.

However, customs recorded the full market value each time. Gold poured from London to Zurich, then from Zurich to JFK, accumulating dollar signs at every checkpoint. Meanwhile, traders chased the price wedge as COMEX futures stood $40 to $50 above London spot, enough spread to cover refinery costs and freight and still lock in tidy returns.

Within weeks, those shipments, refined in Switzerland from London’s smaller “good-delivery” bars into the chunky 100-ounce format, swelled to a jaw-dropping $29 billion a month, a scale the Atlanta Fed’s economists quietly admit they had never seen in three and a half decades of trade data.

“The US gold market has been trading at a premium to the London market since the election result in late 2024,” the London Bullion Market Association told Reuters, noting a more-than-$50 futures premium that pulled bullion across the Atlantic like a monetary magnet.

That premium, fuelled by traders front-running President Trump’s mooted tariff barrage, created a juicy futures-versus-spot arbitrage. Traders could buy cheaper London metal, pay Swiss refiners to recast it, and still pocket profits once the bars were eligible for COMEX delivery.

However, once the White House formally exempted precious metals on 3 April, the Comex–London premium collapsed to $20/oz, and the incentive to keep air-freighting bullion vanished.

Atlanta, meanwhile, endured its own vibe shift.

The Fed district’s vaunted GDPNow “now-cast” model, updated only hours after every data release, suddenly skidded from modest-growth territory to a recession-screaming -3.1% in late February.

Barron’s later called the plunge “a red flag” and reported that GDPNow’s standard run briefly printed -3.7%, then ticked up to around -2.8%, far below rival nowcasts and consensus economists.

Let me put this delicately: the model was duped by the bullion bonanza.

However, Atlanta has missed the mechanical glitch. Gold bars are classified by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) as “non-monetary gold.” Purchases count as imports, which are subtracted from GDP, even though the metal often sits inert in vaults rather than coursing through factories.

The January–February spike left gross imports $22 billion above the Q4 average. Annualised, that gap tops $265 billion. The Fed’s Pat Higgins wrote that this was enough to hit the GDPNow print by 3.6 percentage points.

On 6 March, the Atlanta team bolted a “gold-adjustment” onto the codebase, literally yanking bullion flows out of the net-exports equation. “The model is forecasting smaller, but still slightly negative, first-quarter real GDP growth,” Higgins explained in an internal blog post as he promised to replace the old version on 30 April.

In one stroke, GDPNow lurched from doom-laden 2-ish prints to a far tamer 0.1 percent, a 250-basis-point facelift with the click of a Git commit.

The first estimate for Q1 GDP eventually came out at 0.3% and was later revised to 0.2%. GDPNow’s forecast for Q2 now sits at a much healthier 2% using the new gold-adjusted model.

But why so much metal, so suddenly?

Swiss customs tallied 192.9 tonnes heading west in January alone, thirteen-year highs, after traders feared that a White House “reciprocal tariff” might entangle precious metals despite later carve-outs. Stories of London vault liquidity tightening, together with the COMEX premium, turbo-charged the flow. The LBMA insists stocks remain “strong”, yet market participants whisper about thin spot liquidity, forcing spreads wider and tempting more arbitrage.

The BEA itself was not fooled, as the official advance estimate showed that Q1 GDP fell only 0.3%, which is hardly catastrophic because statisticians have already stripped “valuables” like gold and silver from domestic investment.

Imports still clobbered growth, subtracting almost five full percentage points, but that drag was partly optical, a ledger quirk rather than a real-economy crash. Higgins conceded that inventory data is patchy for the farm and utilities sectors, so the first print could be revised once those beans are counted.

What matters for Bitcoiners?

Absurdity is a word.

In 2025, a trillion-dollar economy’s growth estimate was nearly wrecked by the physical reshaping of hunks of metal, because one country prefers 400-ounce gold bars while another insists on 100-ounce blocks.

Entire pallets of bullion had to be flown from London to Switzerland, melted down, recast to spec, and re-exported to the U.S., not to make jewelry or electronics, but simply to satisfy warehouse eligibility rules for COMEX delivery. All to arbitrage a $50 pricing wedge that existed, largely, because someone floated a new tariff draft. It’s like discovering that GDP turned negative because the shipping containers were the wrong shape.

Compared to Bitcoin, a digital bearer asset with no weight, no borders, and no refinery bottlenecks, this is kinda of embarrassing.

BTC can be transmitted globally in ten minutes or less, 24/7, with final settlement guaranteed. No customs declarations, no harmonised system codes, no “balance-of-payments” reclassifications.

You can’t tariff Bitcoin. You can tariff gold imports.

You don’t need to melt anything to fit it into a specific vault; you just need a valid script and a miner willing to confirm the block. It’s almost comical that while one monetary asset requires furnaces and cargo planes to move between markets, the other crosses continents with a QR code.

Looking forward, the same trade-war jitters that drove bullion stateside remain unresolved, and Higgins warns the absence of another gold wave could whipsaw Q2 nowcasts in the opposite direction.

Should bullion flows normalise, GDPNow might overstate growth as imports retreat (which is interesting given that GDPNow currently stands at 2%). Conversely, a fresh premium could again punch the model below the waterline.

Either way, the Atlanta Fed’s willingness to hot-patch its algorithm highlights a larger lesson: data science is only as good as the metadata you feed it.

Mentioned in this article

For the better part of 60 years, Berkshire Hathaway‘s (BRK.A 1.59%) (BRK.B 1.56%) “Oracle of Omaha” has been living up to his name. Through the closing bell on April 9, Warren Buffett had overseen an aggregate return in his company’s Class A shares (BRK.A) of greater than 6,310,000%!

When you practically double up the annualized total return of the benchmark S&P 500 (^GSPC 1.81%) over six decades, including dividends, you’re going to earn quite the following on Wall Street. Investors are constantly looking for signals from the Oracle of Omaha as to which stock(s) they should buy.

But in spite of Buffett’s love for investing in great businesses, he doesn’t offer stock-specific recommendations. He might speak glowingly about the job CEO Tim Cook has done at Apple, which is Berkshire Hathaway’s largest holding by market value, but you’ll never see Berkshire’s chief recommend that investors buy Apple stock.

There is, however, one investment Buffett has previously recommended for everyday investors — and this suggestion was, coincidentally, last made following a stock market crash.

Here’s the only investment Buffett has recommended for everyday investors

As you’ve probably noticed, volatility has been historic on Wall Street in recent weeks. Between April 3 and April 4, the S&P 500 lost 10.5% of its value, which marked the fifth-steepest decline in the benchmark index in 75 years. It also firmly put the word “crash” on the table for investors.

The last time Wall Street was talking about a bona fide crash was in February-March 2020, during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a span of 33 calendar days, the broad-based S&P 500 lost 34% of its value. It was the quickest 30% decline in the stock market’s history, and the textbook definition of a crash.

Less than six weeks after the S&P 500 reached its COVID-19 crash bottom, Berkshire Hathaway held its annual meeting, albeit virtually. During this meeting, which typically sees Buffett answer a barrage of investors’ questions over a five-hour period, the Oracle of Omaha offered one direct recommendation for everyday investors. Said Buffett,

In my view, for most people, the best thing to do is to own the S&P 500 index fund… You’re dealing with something fundamentally advantageous, in my view, in owning stocks. I will bet on America the rest of my life.

These statements summarize two core philosophies for Warren Buffett. Firstly, the U.S. economy will steadily grow over long periods. Even though recessions are normal, healthy, and inevitable, the average downturn in the U.S. economy over the last eight decades has endured only 10 months. In comparison, the typical economic expansion has stuck around for about five years. Wagering on the U.S. economy to grow, and for public companies to benefit from that growth, has been a wise move.

To build on this point, stock market cycles aren’t linear, either. Based on data aggregated by Bespoke Investment Group, the average S&P 500 bear market dating back to the start of the Great Depression lasted 286 calendar days (through June 8, 2023). Meanwhile, S&P 500 bull markets have lasted an average of 1,011 calendar days — 3.5 times as long as bear markets — over 94 years.

Secondly, this suggestion of buying an S&P 500 index fund speaks to the idea of instant diversification and exposure to the U.S. economy. The S&P 500 is comprised of 500 of the largest and most-influential businesses, many of which are profitable on a recurring basis and will benefit over time from a growing U.S. and global economy.

There are two dozen S&P 500 index funds, but this is the best of the bunch

You might be wondering which S&P 500 index fund to consider buying. After all, there are currently 24 funds that are attempting to mirror the performance of the benchmark index.

The two most-commonly chosen for investors’ portfolios are the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (VOO 1.81%) and SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY 1.80%). These are index funds that own stakes in all 500 companies (a few of which have two classes of shares) that comprise the S&P 500, and adjust their holdings when companies are added or removed due to their market cap, mergers and acquisitions, or their inability to meet required Securities and Exchange Commission filing deadlines.

The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust has approximately $576 billion in invested assets, while the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF sports $1.32 trillion in invested assets. There’s a very good reason for this variance, and it’s precisely why the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF is the smartest index fund to own if you want to closely mirror the performance of the S&P 500.

The key difference between these two index funds is their net expense ratios. This is the fee investors pay annually to cover management, marketing, and administrative costs, less any discounts or fee waivers.

The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust has a low net expense ratio of 0.09%. To put this figure into context, you’ll pay $0.90 in fees for every $1,000 invested. In comparison, the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF offers an even lower net expense ratio of 0.03%, which works out to $0.30 in fees for every $1,000 invested.

On the surface, six basis points doesn’t sound or look like much. But if you’re investing a lot of money into an S&P 500 index fund, or allowing your investment to grow over multiple decades, this six-basis-point difference can really add up.

Hypothetically, if you invested $500,000 into the SPDR S&P 500 ETF for 30 years and averaged an annual return of 7%, you’d pay $94,880 in fees and end up with $3,711,247. This same scenario with the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF would result in just $31,884 in fees and $3,774,243 in future value. It’s quite the difference, and all the more reason why the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF is the superior tracking fund to own.

Travis Hoium has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Fluence Energy. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.