Featured Trades: (RESIDENTIAL REAL ESTATE) 3) Bring on the Housing Double Dip. This is another 'I told you so' piece, so if that sort of thing annoys you, skip on. Yesterday's 300,000 figure for new home sales was absolutely diabolical, 26.8% lower than the 410,000 that was expected and the worst since 1963. This is [...]

Featured Trades: (MIDDLE EAST BOOK REVIEW) 4) The Ultimate Book on the Middle East. I just finished reading Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East from 1776 to the Present by Michael B. Oren, an encyclopedic recent history of the Middle East. As an investor, you are going to have to be knowledgeable [...]

'There is a massive, rotting pool of mortgages on bank balance sheets.'¦There is no doubt there is going to be a double dip in housing,' said Meredith Whitney, CEO of the Meredith Whitney Advisory Group.

Featured Trades: (SOYBEANS), (SOYBEAN MEAL), Teucrium Agricultural Trust Corn Fund Teucrium Agricultural Trust Soybean Fund Teucrium Agricultural Trust Wheat Fund Teucrium Agricultural Trust Sugar Fund 1) Going Back into the Ags. OK, I can’t stand it anymore. After staying out of the agricultural sector for the past six months I’m going back in. I’m not [...]

Featured Trades: (GLOBAL TAX RATES) 2) Thank Goodness I don't live in Sweden! I pulled the chart below off of Paul Kedrosky's ever insightful website, Infectious Greed, showing world tax rates as a percentage of GDP for the past 40 years. Sweden suffers the world's heaviest tax burden at 51%, compared to only 27% in [...]

Featured Trades: (ELECTRIC CARS), (NISSAN LEAF) 3) Pushing Electric Cars on Capitol Hill. FedEx founder and CEO Fred Smith, an ex Navy pilot who I admire enormously, was on Capitol Hill yesterday lobbying for electric cars. In 2009, the US spent $188 billion on crude oil imports, far and away our largest, and 70% went [...]

Featured Trades: (CORN), (WEAT), (SOYB), (CANE), (UNG), (USO) Teucrium Agricultural Trust Corn Fund Teucrium Agricultural Trust Soybean Fund Teucrium Agricultural Trust Wheat Fund Teucrium Agricultural Trust Sugar Fund 4) New Ag ETF’s to Hit the Market. Teucrium Trading LLC has at long last plugged a gaping hole in the ETF line up by announcing the [...]

'The really big problem here is that we have 10% unemployment now. If you drop it 1/2% a year for ten years, we're not going to reach full employment before we reach the next recession,' said Lachmann Achutman, managing director of the Economic Cycle Research Institute.

Featured Trades: (TREASURY BONDS), (TBT) ProShares Ultra Short Lehman 20 Plus TBT 1) The Bond Market is Blind to Risk. After promising to deliver you a nicely marbled, medium rare, prime rib, I am the first to admit when I actual come up with a piece of tasteless, salt water injected Costco turkey. I am [...]

Featured Trades: (MDR), (BP), (RIG), (HAL), (GZPFY.PK), (XOM), (RDS/A) 2) The Value Player's Take on BP. OK, I promise I won't talk about BP again until the stock breaks one way or another. But no sooner do I put out the call to buy the pariah stock at $29, than I hear Whitney Tilson of [...]

Featured Trades: (MDR), (BP), (RIG), (HAL) 3) Looking for Energy Babies Thrown Out With the Bathwater. The great game among hedge funds now is to find the babies that have been thrown out with the bathwater because of the Gulf oil spill disaster. The halving of the share Price of BP (BP), Transocean (RIG), and [...]

Featured Trades: (DINOSAUR MARKET) 4) Watch Out for Those Dinosaur Turds. The dinosaur bone market has crunched. Once a favorite collectable of high flying hedge fund managers, the prices of everything from tyrannosaurus rex to brontosaurus fossils have skidded. A recent auction of a triceratops skeleton failed to reach its minimum bid of $1 million. [...]

'It's time to go back to the old ways. This world of transaction based banking, where algorithms trade umpteen shares in microseconds, would have appalled (British banker from the thirties to the seventies), Sigmund Warburg. We ought to go back to relationship based banking,' said The Ascent of Money author and Harvard business school professor, [...]

  Featured Trades: (BP), (CHK), (DVN)   1) Oil Patch Gossip About BP. Over the years, I have invested so much time wildcatting in the oil patch that I will never be wanting for great steaks at Nick & Sam’s in Dallas, skyboxes at Cowboys games, and personally signed 8 X 10 glossy photographs of [...]

Featured Trades: (NATURAL GAS) 2) Natural Gas Indigestion. I always thought that a great strategy for a new hedge fund would be to only buy positions from existing hedge funds that were blowing up. That fund would buy securities subject to margin calls and distressed liquidations, which are by definition at six standard deviation extremes. [...]