00:00Donald Trump, the president of the United States, specializes in flooding the zone.
00:05Flooding the zone with information, that is.
00:07In fact, he says so much that betting markets have offered a variety of wagers
00:12on deciding whether or not Trump will actually follow through on all the stuff he's saying.
00:18My colleague Carolyn Silberman and I took a look at more than 300 markets on Polymarket
00:25that lay down wagers on whether or not Trump will do what he says he's going to do.
00:31Now, we're not offering investment advice.
00:34We're not even offering gambling advice.
00:36What we discovered was you're better off most of the time betting that he will do absolutely nothing.
00:44Betting that Trump wouldn't do anything, simply betting no, he won't do it,
00:49would have produced a return of about 12% on your bets between Inauguration Day of this year and the end of September.
00:57By comparison, the S&P 500, the bellwether index of how the stock market performs,
01:04would have given you 13% in a very robust year.
01:07On the other hand, if you bet yes, Trump would take action, you would have lost 20% of your money.
01:13Again, there's a simple rule, just bet against Trump doing anything.
01:19That's not simply true about how you should wager around Trump.
01:24It's also really useful to consider about how you should think about Trump.
01:28A caveat in all this, we're not saying to ignore what Trump does.
01:33He does take action on a meaningful amount of the things he says.
01:37But you should ignore the noise and focus on what's meaningful.
01:42For example, Trump recently gave a speech in Quantico, Virginia to the United States' top military officials.
01:50It was a long, meandering speech, 77 minutes long, and Trump jumped into some familiar themes.
01:57He talked about his favorite restaurants.
01:59He talked about how corrupt Joe Biden was.
02:02He talked about many, many things, and it would have been easy to fall asleep, look away, or tune out.
02:07But at about 44 minutes into that speech, he also mentioned that he was considering allowing the U.S. military to use the nation's cities as training grounds.
02:19That's significant.
02:20It's important.
02:21It would be another abuse of his presidential powers.
02:24And if you had simply tuned out, you would have missed it.
02:27So don't tune out completely.
02:29Just focus on what matters and tune out the rest.
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