Let’s do this week’s Live Q&A Chat Live Stream Conference Call today at 2pm ET. You can watch it live and ask me questions live on The IAm Cody Willard App for iOS and Android. I’ll also take questions over the phone on our conference call line (Dial-in: 641-715-0700 Access Code: 709981), in the Trading With Cody chat room or just email us your question to support@tradingwithcody.com.

Congrats to my old friend and my first TV news mentor, Larry Kudlow, on being named as President’s new Chief Economist. Here’s a couple old clips from when I was his sidekick on CNBC’s Kudlow and Company.

Without Larry Kudlow, I wouldn’t have had a career on TV. Let me explain —

In 2001, I partnered with Jim Cramer’s The Street to publish a newsletter called The Telecom Connection. Many of my current Trading With Cody subscribers have been readers of mine since those days. Dave Morrow, the Editor-in-Chief of The Street back then, told Cramer that I’d mentioned to him that I wanted to launch a hedge fund. Cramer told him to tell me that Jim himself would be happy to sit down with me and talk about how to launch a hedge fund. Months later, after I’d spent every waking moment putting my hedge fund together, I went back to Cramer to tell him about my impending launch and how I hadn’t raised much money for my hedge fund. Cramer, amazingly graciously says to me, “I’m going to have you come on Kudlow & Cramer [Larry and Jim had an eponymous primetime show on CNBC at the time, three years before Jim Cramer’s Mad Money launched] to talk about launching your hedge fund. That should help close some of your potential investors who are on the fence. People love seeing their investment manager on TV.” Or something like that.

Over the next year or so, I think I made a couple more appearances on “Kudlow & Cramer” before they split and each took their own shows in primetime. Larry’s new show, “Kudlow & Company” needed panelists who could talk stocks and Larry and his producers started booking me regularly to the point where after a couple years, I was sitting next to him as an informal sidekick three or four nights a week.

Larry and I and his lovely wife, Judith, went to dinner a couple times at his favorite restaurant in NYC and the discussions were incredibly deep and broad, as we’d talk life, love, supply-side economics, corporatism, how I should be “branding myself,” subsidies, welfare, race issues and so on.

In the midst of all of this, the powerful Hollywood agency CAA, had taken a big interest in representing me and so I hooked up with their long-time top TV news/personality agent who then started talking to CNBC about having me join “Kudlow & Company” in a formal sidekick arrangement. Meanwhile, “Fast Money” was just about to launch and CNBC was filming pilot/test versions of how the format would be and who the regular team would be on that show. While I was on set filming a pilot version of “Fast Money” with Eric Bolling, the Najarian brothers, and others, I got a very nice text from Larry and his producer saying something like, “Cody, we don’t want to lose you to Fast Money…”

However, Fox Business was about to launch and I had actually created a deck for them for a show that I would anchor that would be irreverent, insightful and would have segments like “Backseat Broker” where I’d sit in the back of a cab with someone to talk about their financial situation. Or “Cody’s Shot Clock” where I’d hit the three most important headlines of the day.

Rather than formally joining Larry as a sidekick or Fast Money as part of the core team, I ended up at Fox Business anchoring “Happy Hour.”

But Larry and I have stayed in touch over the years and I talk to him at least once a year or so. He and I do not see eye-to-eye on many of our economic beliefs and principles. And you guys know how anti-partisan I am. Larry’s a prominent Republican economist who served under Reagan. So to be clear when I say that Larry is a mentor of mine, I mean that he has been a mentor of mine on TV — not that I embrace any of the political/economic or affiliation with Trump (or Obama or Reagan or Clinton or any Republican or Democrat of course).

I would not have had a TV career on CNBC or on Fox Business without the support of Larry Kudlow (and Jim Cramer and CAA and countless other people). I do know that Larry’s got a great heart and a loving soul.

But to the point here for Trading With Cody subscribers — is Larry’s appointment vs Gary Cohn vs someone else meaningful to the stock market and/or to the economy? I’d rather have Larry than Gary, but let’s remember that the forces of the Republican Democrat Regime and the Federal Reserve and the developed corporatist-driven economies of the EU and much of the rest of the world, are churning along as usual.

And meanwhile, here’s a sample of the kind of emails I’m starting to get from people from the bitcoin/cryptocurrency/blockchain trading world:

“Hey Cody, hope all is well with you lately. I’ve been following some of your stuff about bitcoin/altcoins. What do you think about what’s been happening this past week. Is it a time to sell and wait until ti goes lower (recovers), or to just hold and see what happens. I appreciate your insight! p.s. I’ve actually LOST a ton of money on bitcoins, not made. Scared as hell lately at what’s been going on and if it could get worse.”

Four months ago, when I wrote my book “The Great Cryptocurrency Crash” here’s the kind of emails I was getting:

“A very few times in your trading lifetime you get to shoot fish in a barrel with about zero risk (short of an asteroid strike). Buy cryptos!”

I will tell you that, unfortunately, I expect there is going to be a lot more pain in the crypto world before the bottom gets put in. At the bottom, the emails I’ll be getting from crypto-traders won’t even exist.

See you at the chat!