Ten years ago, I nailed it. I even remember the exact day: Friday, March 6, 2009. I don’t mean to brag, but it was one of the best calls I ever made. The market had been in a long and brutal decline after the financial crisis and Great Recession. The S&P 500 was down 57% from its last high, which had come nearly two years earlier. The next trading day, Monday, March 9, the S&P 500 made its closing low of 676.53. Ten years later, on Friday, March 8, 2019, the S&P closed at 2,743.07 – a 311% gain. And now we’re up to a 339% gain after racking up new highs last week!

Good, better, best. Never let it rest. Until your good is better and your better is best. I thought about that quote when analyzing the performance of the market, marijuana stocks in general, and the marijuana stocks I’ve recommended in particular. Good: The S&P 500 had its best first half of a year in two decades, up 17%. Any industry that can beat the market by 20% will make investors a lot of money over time. Better: Marijuana stocks beat that by 10 percentage points. BEST: Our Investment Opportunities cannabis stocks killed both the S&P 500 and broad marijuana stocks, surging 42% on average.

Here’s some trivia for you: Which American holiday is #1 for beer retailers? As you might have guessed by the timing of my question — it’s the Fourth of July! According to the National Beer Wholesalers Association, the demand for beer right now is double that of a typical week. And the Fourth is a milestone for the industry, much like “Black Friday” is for other retailers. On some of the biggest days for backyard barbecues, beer companies are moving a lot of six-packs. No surprise there. I’ll probably have a few cold ones myself on the holiday. So why — right in the middle of its best season — did one of the biggest alcohol distributors make a major investment outside of its industry?

Marijuana is the kind of industry where people either love it... or hate it. So, when I write about it, I tend to hear from readers who either love it... or hate it. So, today I want to take a look at the numbers. They tell the real story. When Leafly.com wanted to run a jobs report on the U.S. cannabis industry, it realized that the federal government was not tracking it. So the website hired Whitney Economics. And from looking at state and industry data, it found that nearly 65,000 cannabis-related jobs were created in 2018. It was a 44% increase, on the heels of +21% in 2017. All in all, total cannabis jobs came in at 211,000. But when you factor in indirect jobs, it’s more like 296,000 jobs.