One week in and the revealing wild weird world of Donald Trump has been put on show, with Australian billionaire Anthony Pratt of Visy and Pratt Industries fame becoming an American citizen and moving permanently to the US. While that’s not in any way weird given Pratt’s big business in the States, his link to President Trump is!

There’s a great yarn today in the SMH about this high-achieving Aussie Anthony Pratt, who has created 70 factories across America and employs 12,000 people. His business achievements make him an outstanding Australian entrepreneur, who took his father Dick Pratt’s cardboard box operation and made it into an international powerhouse. This has become a showcase for what can be done with a real commitment to recycling.

Need more proof? Well, this year the AFR calculated his net worth at a cool $11.4 billion!

That’s the inspirational aspect to this story by Colin Kruger in the SMH, but there’s a strange side to Mr Pratt’s life in the US that involves his relationship with Donald Trump, which reminds us of what we’re bound to see over the next four years.

You might say, so what? My interest is primarily about the stock market and the return of Donald adds uncertainty to share playing. That’s why I’m focussing on this Pratt piece.

To be balanced, right now Wall Street loves this ‘Trump rides again’ story but this guy can throw a curve ball. That’s what an investor has to be ready for with their portfolios. Right now, what the President does with the Ukraine war, the Middle East war, Taiwan and the related likely battle with Beijing over tariffs, which are likely to be imposed on Europe as well, all makes for issues that investors just can’t ignore.

Because I have financial advice clients, subscribers to the Switzer Report and readers of this Switzer Daily column, on top of my radio and TV viewers, Trump has made my day-to-day life a damn side trickier.

So, what are the Pratt-Trump close encounters of a ‘weird’ kind? Here’s a taste of Kruger’s story:

1. He says he put $100,000 on a Trump win in 2016 and pocketed $450,000.
2. He has been a member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, and this year’s entry fee has gone from US$700,000 to US$1 million!
3. After a meeting with Trump in 2021, a CNN investigation quoted a driver who heard Pratt’s chief of staff being told classified information “about Russian submarines and US submarines…”

There’s more that has to be seen to be believed but the bottom line is that the Pratt-Trump story reminds us of what potentially lies out there from 2025 to the end of 2028.

While Kruger, the SMH, CNN and 60 Minutes all have more on this news item, I was taken aback by how Trump reacted to the news about Pratt, the car driver and the so-called classified information.

Here it is: “Trump dismissed those accounts at the time, posting on social media that the stories ‘about a red-haired weirdo from Australia, named Anthony Pratt, is Fake News’.

That is ‘oh so Trump’. Investors have been warned!