Go some place or other, young man!
Key Markets report for Thursday, 13 November 2025
My friend Matt Smith - the same Matt Smith who recently returned from Azerbaijan (here’s that report) - also reported from another fascinating and important journey, exploring the horizons that I myself, as a parent, often wonder about. This journey started with “a single, terrifying question…” and it’s very much worth sharing.
As his son Maxim reached the age of 18 and graduated from high school, he had no idea what to do next. Neither did his father, since “The default path we’ve all been sold—go to college, get a degree, get a job—felt broken. It felt like a trap. Rising costs, ideological indoctrination, and degrees that no longer guarantee competence or opportunity… it was clear that modern academia had failed.” Going to college can easily turn out to be “the single worst financial decision a young person could make today.”
Advice for the young at heart…
In looking for a new and different path forward, Smith and his son, together with Smith’s mentor, the legendary Doug Casey, put their heads together and wrote a manual for young men and women embarking on life’s adventure. They wrote up “The Preparation,” an impressive book / manual providing authoritative guidance for young people.
The book asks and answers many crucial questions such as these:
What does it mean to be competent, confident, and dangerous?
How to finance the preparation?
What if you’re broke?
“The Preparation” also addresses many important concepts like “the compounding value of your reputation.” In all, Casey and the Smiths formulated a comprehensive process - a “right of passage” that “replaces classroom memorization with real-world experiences. It’s designed to build virtue, values, skills, connections, and confidence in a young man or woman to navigate an increasingly unstable and unclear future.”
Well, I’d like to add that the material is not only for the young. Increasingly, the path of stable employment and steady careers is becoming a thing of the past even for the more experienced people. In this sense, “The Preparation” is a valid guide for reinventing self for all who want to do so, or are forced to.
Words AND action
The best part about The Preparation is that the Smiths went beyond writing words. They put the whole enchilada into action: a real life experiment with all their skins in the game.
QUOTE:
“Over the past two years, Maxim has been pioneering this model. He’s…
Gotten his EMT or Emergency Medical Technician license…
Worked as an apprentice to an Uruguayan gaucho…
Worked with a geophysics crew for a gold exploration company…
Learned how to sail in the Falkland Islands…
Started an agricultural drone business…
He has even learned to fly a plane…
And that’s just scratching the surface. He’s done all of this by the age of 20.
This process is providing him with a lifetime of real-world experiences, contacts, and opportunities that most adults will never see. And the best part? He’s getting paid along the way.
UNQUOTE
“Ultimately,” writes Smith, “your child’s education isn’t about what they learn… It’s about who they become. Will they become another beer-drinking frat-boy, saddled with debt and stepping into a world that doesn’t need them? Or will they become a true renaissance man or woman, capable of adapting to a world that needs their adventurous, adaptable spirit, and real-world experience?”
Maxim and Matt’s journey was fascinating enough to appear on The Glenn Beck Podcast:
Having received a copy of Casey and Smith’s book, I couldn’t help feeling a sense of relief and encouragement - the possibility that my own children can clear their own way forward beyond the path more traveled of school-university-job-retirement and hopefully make themselves into new “Renaissance men” rather than corporate drones, sitting in legal or compliance departments of some corporate “dark satanic mill.”
The Preparation can provide a compass and reassurance to parents: some smart people have done this. It can be done. That’s great news and a great example to follow - and share. Smith’s recent article with all the references is linked below:
To learn more about TrendCompass reports please check our main TrendCompass web page. We encourage you to also have a read through our TrendCompass User Manual page. For U.S. investors: an investable, fully managed portfolio based on I-System TrendFollowing is available from our partner advisory (more about it here).
Today’s trading signals
With yesterday’s closing prices we have the following changes for the Key Markets portfolio:
