A Day In the Life of 5 Bullets

We Appreciate the Praise, But…

“The 5 is the only place I get my ‘news’ anymore,” a reader wrote to us some years back — using this e-letter’s bygone nickname. “It's clear to me you call it like you see it with no political bias whatsoever. So keep doing what you're doing!”

Affirmed another: “The only news I get is here and from a couple of mainly financial newsletters.”

We were aghast. In response, we paraphrased the cereal commercials of days gone by — this daily dispatch is only part of a well-balanced informational diet.

Around the same time, a reader requested “For Dave: I’d be interested in a description of your daily informational intake.”

Nor was he the only one.

It was a great question — especially considering my own background with 20 years in the TV news racket. I’ve been out for nearly as long, but the news-junkie part of me never went away. I’ll never tire of coming across a story that makes me say, “Holy $#*%!”... and I hope that zeal comes through to you in these missives.

I promised back then to divulge my daily informational diet, more than once — but didn’t get around to delivering until 2022.

What follows is a 2026 update: Look for many revisions if you saw the 2025 version…

For starters, I’m compelled to point out that at the core of this e-letter are the paradigms — the ways of looking at markets and the economy — developed by our own experts at Paradigm Press. Without that, I’d be just another rando on the internet.

Jim Rickards’ input — especially in the early years of his work with our firm — has been seminal. Of course, James Altucher provides a crucial window into the worlds of artificial intelligence and crypto.

Enrique Abeyta brings us 30 years of trading know-how. Ray Blanco is ahead of the curve in tech and biotech. Zach Scheidt’s passion for income and value investing is second to none. Our recovering investment banker, the inimitable Sean Ring, never lacks for something lively to say. Byron King has been my colleague for 19 years, keeping a pulse on energy and natural resources – now joined by Matt Badiali.

Basically, I have the same level of access to their ideas as do members of our VIP level of service called the Omega Wealth Circle — only I get paid to read our editors’ work instead of the other way around!

[As long as I brought it up: Are you intrigued by the idea of all-you-can-eat access to everything we publish? That’s what our Omega Wealth Circle offers. The key advantage is the substantial savings you achieve over subscribing to all of our services individually.

The Omega Wealth Circle isn’t for everyone… and we don’t open membership to just anyone. But if you already have two or more subscriptions with us, you can expect an invitation sooner or later.]

“So Where Does Dave Get His News?”

My day begins at 5:00 a.m. Eastern Time. First thing, I skim the news alerts that crossed my iPad overnight. (More about those later.)

From there, it’s a regimented sequence that goes like this…

• Front page of The New York Times. Like it or not, the Times’ front page sets the agenda for mainstream discourse in these United States — and its longevity in that regard is formidable. When I was growing up, the Gray Lady was part of an influential troika along with CBS News and Time magazine. The latter two have faded into irrelevance, but the Times endures — even as much of the rest of corporate media are now owned by only a half-dozen companies. Ignore it at your peril

• The BBC iPad app: Here too, it’s a case of “know thine enemy.” A shame, really. As a young man in pre-internet days, I listened faithfully to the BBC World Service’s straight-arrow coverage on a shortwave radio. Its correspondents were everywhere! But the Beeb was already going downhill in the mid-1990s… and by 2002–03, it was just one more useless mouthpiece for the George Bush-Tony Blair death march toward endless war. Still… the BBC retains the same cachet around the world that the Times has here at home

• Financial Times: I scan the front-page stories, but for any number of reasons — including decades of habit — I devote more attention to…

• The Wall Street Journal: Here, every front-page story — including the “What’s News” summary — gets at least enough attention from me to decide whether I should read beyond the first paragraph.

Ideally, I burn through all of that in about 20 minutes. Then it’s off to the rest of my morning activities before I settle in for the day in earnest and resume my morning news cruise.

I check a handful of other sources before applying fingers to keyboard…

There’s Ed Steer’s Gold & Silver Digest – a subscriber-only e-letter that’s a comprehensive window on the precious metals markets. But equally valuable are the crowdsourced links to financial news items I might not come across otherwise.

Meanwhile, geopolitics can always move markets, and it pays to know what sort of trouble the U.S. government is stirring up around the world. For over a quarter-century, Antiwar.com has been second-to-none in this regard — going all the way back to Bill Clinton’s Kosovo war in 1999.

As noted in the 2025 edition, I gave up on the Drudge Report in 2024. 

Since last year I’ve also given up the “Reason Roundup” column posted each morning by Reason magazine. Just useless under its present editor.

But I still keep up with currency maven and old friend Chuck Butler, proprietor of the venerable Daily Pfennige-letter.

Social Media (Mostly X)

When X was still called Twitter, I was able to peruse the site without an account. Elon Musk made me break down and get one.

I’ve managed to resist the site’s addictive qualities… although within the last year I’ve begun occasionally commenting and reposting. 

Then and now, by following a dozen or so key accounts, I discover…

1. Pithy hot takes that help punctuate these daily missives and
2. More news I might not discover anywhere else.

The financial accounts I follow have undergone a major overhaul since last year. Shortly after the Iran war started I had the good fortune of stumbling across three accounts that are must-follows…

• Calvin Froedge, @calvinfroedge. He’s the proprietor of Marhelm, a shipping-data platform. His BS threshold might be even lower than mine, and that’s saying something

• Don Johnson, @DonMiami3. He’s chief economist at an outfit called MacroEdge and a keen observer of the energy markets

• Carolina Lion, @CarolinaLion2. I hesitate to mention an anonymous account but he – I think it’s a he – frequently has worthwhile things to say. 

All three of these accounts have exercised a healthy skepticism about the prospects for a U.S.-Iran agreement… and an appropriate level of alarm about the cutoff of oil and other natural resources from the Persian Gulf region.

• Meanwhile I still keep up with Don Durrett, @DonDurrett, an authority on precious metals and mining stocks.

There are also some non-financial accounts that give me fodder now and then…

• Glenn Greenwald, @ggreenwald. The premier civil libertarian of the 21st century. He came to the fore during the Dubya Bush years as an old-school liberal. He’s still an old-school liberal; it’s the center-left of the Democratic Party that went full-on authoritarian during the 2010s

• Will Schryver, @imetatronink. Fascinating military analyst. His background is an enigma but his knowledge is second-to-none. Absolute must-follow 

• Scott Horton, @scotthortonshow. His presence on X isn’t always consistent, but that’s because he wears so many hats now – director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of Antiwar.com, cohost of the Provoked podcast with Darryl Cooper, etc. But whenever he weighs in it’s always worthwhile.

I have given up on Michael Tracey, long my favorite political reporter. Perhaps I’ll get back into him as we get closer to the midterm elections, but last year he became zealous to a fault in attempting to debunk anything and everything related to the late financier and sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein. 

Tracey is certainly correct that many women claiming to have been “victimized” while in their 20s appear to be angling for generous legal settlements. But from my perch there are still too many unanswered questions surrounding Epstein – especially when it comes to the Virgin Islands’ lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase, swept under the rug with a pittance of a settlement in 2023.

You’ll notice a lack of “conservative” websites on my list.

Sorry, but most of them are really subpar. Several years ago I solicited reader input about what folks were reading instead of Drudge, and I was shocked at the level of quality. Any worthwhile original reporting was buried in story after story whose only purpose was to reinforce right-wingers’ tribal identity. (Of course, the purpose of much mainstream reporting these days is to merely reinforce left-wingers’ tribal identity.)

If there is worthwhile original reporting at such conservative sites — i.e., Chuck Ross’ Russiagate coverage for The Daily Caller a few years ago — I figure I’ll hear about it via X or the other sources listed above.

Same goes, by the way, for the premier “alt” financial site ZeroHedge. (I have my issues with ZH — but all the same, I’ve been compelled to rise to its defense more than once.)

News in Progress

Because the news never stops, I stay abreast of events even as I write.

I like to think one of the unique elements of this e-letter is that of immediacy. Yes, I’m often writing about longer-term trends… but if I can point out that there’s something happening right this minute to underscore my point, well, so much the better.

So my iPad is set up to receive news alerts from maybe a half-dozen sources.

It’s kind of amazing when I think about it: Modern technology can give anyone the same adrenaline rush that was once limited to folks like me who worked in a newsroom.

Long before the internet came along, every newsroom had access to a “wire service” furnished by an agency like The Associated Press.

When breaking news happened, the teletype would go ding-ding-ding. Would it change the lineup of tonight’s newscast? Or the layout of tomorrow morning’s front page? The only way to know was to get up from your desk and walk over to the machine.

I’m just old enough to have changed the paper and ribbons on a teletype machine exactly like this one [Photo from the Salt Lake County Archives]

As newsrooms computerized in the 1985–95 timeframe, the wire services were fully integrated into those systems along with other functions like word processing, story filing, etc. No need to get up from your desk anymore; breaking news appeared at the top of everyone’s screen at once. But well into the 21st century, the little dopamine hit that came with every “urgent” or “bulletin” (or the extremely rare “flash”) was still limited to newsroom types.

That all changed when Apple launched iOS 3 in 2009 — incorporating push notifications. Every news purveyor with an app could send breaking news straight to your pocket. These 5 Bullets wouldn’t be what they are without it.

Too, I have a handful of international news channels streaming on three or four screens with the sound down. It gives me a ground-truth perspective on the news and the markets in other countries.

There’s France 24, Germany’s DW, Qatar’s Al Jazeera, Russia’s RT and China’s CGTN, among others. Yes, they’re all government-run and have an agenda. But they’re way less crazy-making than American news channels. Too, having them on is kind of a throwback to my shortwave radio-listening days.

And truth be told, it’s also a way to recreate a newsroom atmosphere in my home office — you know, with all the TVs tuned to various channels…

You can take the boy out of the newsroom, but you can’t take the newsroom out of the boy…

Perspective

If all of this sounds a little intense, well, I suppose it is.

Nor is the intensity limited to my “working” hours. There’s always something urgent or important or interesting happening. Rare is the evening or weekend when I’m not jotting something down that I think might be useful for these daily dispatches.

Which is all fine. What’s less fine is that the intensity has been amped up to extreme levels ever since the world started flying apart in 2020.

It began with arbitrary lockdowns… and then riots brought on in part by economic insecurity… followed by a tightening noose of censorship… the risk of getting “financially canceled”… and the starkest threat of nuclear war in 60 years.

The Trump 47 administration delivered an epic strategic blunder – a war that was supposed to be over in four days and that may or may not be (tentatively) resolved now. All to halt a nuclear weapons program that never existed and reopen a waterway that was open before the war began.

If I’m not careful… I’ll function in a chronic state of anxiety that I’m missing an important piece of information for my writing… or for the life that my wife and I have worked so hard to create for ourselves… or both.

Gotta stay centered and have faith that I’ll see what I need to see when I need to see it. And it’s with that faith I’ll often venture out for a morning hike before sitting down in the chair.

Which reminds me… I ran across this meme in 2022 and keep it on my computer desktop now. I share it with you now because, well, maybe you need it as a reminder too?