The COVID-19 pandemic and its economic repercussions have brought the matter into clear focus. The world’s economy has, essentially, been shut down. The Federal Reserve has injected well over $2 trillion of stimulus to get things moving again. Add in the government stimulus and the total is greater than $6 trillion. My opinion has been that the total will exceed $10 trillion when all is said and done. When the dust settles, one emerging risk is that the mass cash infusion could lead to inflation… and the U.S. dollar to fall further in value. All around the world, people are sick and tired of their leaders debasing their currency. Case in point: Today, the dollar is worth roughly HALF what it was worth in 1990.

Laszlo Hanyecz didn’t expect to make history when he ordered two large pizzas from Papa John’s in May 2010. But he did. Hanyecz paid for his pizzas using bitcoin in what’s believed to the first transaction using the cryptocurrency to pay for a product. And – this is almost too painful to write – he paid what would now be more than $75 million for the two pizzas. He ordered two because he liked to munch on leftovers the next day. Meanwhile, he had no idea that second pizza would one day cost him nearly $38 million. The reason why is actually pretty simple though. Each bitcoin was worth about $0.003 at that point in time, so the 10,000 bitcoins he used to pay for the pizzas were worth about $30.

If you pay any attention to the world of cryptocurrency, you’ve probably noticed that the market has produced some amazing winners over the past couple years. For instance, twice in bitcoin’s history, a preprogrammed event has taken place that caused its price to soar into the stratosphere. I explained what this event, known as “the halvening,” is all about in Thursday’s MoneyWire. Basically, after bitcoin undergoes a halvening, the market receives half of the daily supply of new bitcoins. If supply drops and demand holds up or rises – and it will – prices increase. It’s simple economics. In the months that followed the first halvening in November 2012, the bitcoin price rose 2,135%.

I regularly discuss different hypergrowth investing themes, and for good reason. My goal is to offer recommendations to my subscribers that have the chance to grow as much as 100-fold because of the massive, wealth-generating power of newfound industries or technologies that go on to change the world. Cryptocurrencies are in this category. If you’ve been tuning out this new asset class worth over $190 billion as of this writing, please don’t continue down this path. Not this year. Not when so many catalysts are setting up behind bitcoin and its altcoin cousins. It could leave you wondering what life-altering gains actually look like. To give you a sense of what I’m talking about, let’s step in the MoneyWire time machine

Back in November 2012, a change took place to the way bitcoin rewards miners for creating new coins and securing the network. We talked about this hugely significant event in yesterday’s MoneyWire. It’s called “the halvening” among industry insiders, and it happens about every four years. It is written into bitcoin’s “DNA” if you will – or its code base. Essentially, the new supply of bitcoin dropped and the demand for it kept chugging along. In the months that followed, bitcoin’s price soared an amazing 2,135%, bringing a spectacular windfall to early investors who saw the importance of the halvening well ahead of time. As I explained yesterday, we’re about to experience another bitcoin halvening in mere weeks…

The headlines have been filled with ways to make money in what many are calling the “new normal,” due to the pandemic. As more people work from home, there has been a rush into telework stocks such as Zoom Video (ZM). There’s also more time to watch movies and television, so Netflix (NFLX) rallied to a new all-time high. But the sector that has easily been garnering the most attention has been telehealth. The ability to see your doctor via your phone or computer has never been so important. Most doctor visits are due to non-life-threatening situations and therefore can be handled remotely. I, for example, had a follow-up with my doctor yesterday morning via the camera on my phone to go over some lab work.

On March 18, exactly one month ago, I wrote to you about how the market plunge felt like “a punch to the gut” and “a kick to the head.” We were in the midst of the panic selling craziness, and I wanted to remind you how the market always recovers… and that there were some incredible bargains to be had. A month later, we’re still stuck at home and much of the economy is shut down, but the S&P 500 has rallied 20.5%... and 28.5% off the lows that came a few days later on March 23. Many stocks have done even better. In that time, I’ve added five recommendations to the Crisis and Opportunity Portfolio.

Stocks closed the week on a high note as the good news continued to build heading into the weekend. The three major stock indices were up 3.8% on average this week (the Nasdaq was up more than 6%) and are now sitting at one-month highs as investors digest the news about a possible COVID-19 treatment and the eventual re-opening of America. In today’s new episode of MoneyLine, I cover the increasing positive headlines surrounding the pandemic and stocks. And, more importantly, I explain why stocks have been rallying recently. For the last several weeks, biotech firm Gilead Sciences (GILD) has been touted in the news as the company with the most promising potential of creating a treatment for the coronavirus.

The market remains volatile, but it has not had back-to-back down days in over three weeks. In that time, the S&P 500 has gained nearly 30% from its March low. Amid all that volatility, we launched our Crisis and Opportunity Portfolio specifically to take advantage of opportunities emerging from the extreme selling. The performance has been nothing short of impressive. The portfolio is up 25.9% versus a gain of 12.6% for the S&P 500. The four stocks in the portfolio all fall into our long-term investment trends. And all four are small-cap stocks that are flying under the radar of the average investor. I shared one stock with you at my Crisis and Opportunity Investment Summit on April 2 and it's already up big.

For most of March, it felt like the world was ending, especially if you looked at Twitter. The atmosphere was total panic. Then, on April 1, I sat down for a free, public webinar to say that not only is it time to start buying… I’m going to go on record with the #1 stock to buy right now. Let’s look back at the call I made that night, how it’s panned out so far, and what it means for you. If I may, let me quote myself from the night of April 1: This is one of my favorite stocks right now, and this is one of the stocks that we're adding tonight to the Crisis & Opportunity Portfolio for Early Stage Investor. Stock number one, Catasys (CATS). It's a pretty small stock, at a $237 million market cap.

We all dream of amazing profits from the next Google (GOOGL) or Amazon (AMZN). Well, this is the time to find them – among great small caps that have been unfairly hit in this coronavirus crisis. Not just any small caps, of course. The innovators. The job creators. The ones who show the early signs of going on to do great things. I’m talking about boldly buying something like Netflix (NFLX) in 2008. Back then, Netflix was mostly a mail-order DVD rental company. It was a small cap worth $1.3 billion. And we were in the thick of the financial crisis. Ten years later, you’d have been up 11,000%... even 12,000%. Sadly, many, many people missed out on that buying opportunity in 2008.