(SPECIAL FOOD ISSUE) Featured Trades: (POT), (MOS), (AGU), (DBA) 2) The Bull Market in Food Is Only Just Starting. I believe that the surge in the price of food we have seen in recent weeks is the beginning of a major, secular, long term trend. During the sixties, new dwarf varieties, irrigation, fertilizer, and heavy [...]

'Analysts don't know preferred stock from livestock,' said Gordon Gekko in the classic film Wall Street.

Featured Trades: (JULY NONFARM PAYROLL)   1) Job Creation is Still on Vacation. If I have learned one thing from 40 years in the financial markets, it’s that traders demand instant gratification. So when the July nonfarm payroll showed a loss of 131,000 jobs, an unchanged unemployment rate at 9.5%, and total unemployment of 14.6 [...]

Featured Trades: (HEDGE FUND HIRING) 2) The Cooling Market for Hedge Fund Traders. The tide is suddenly heading out to sea for aspiring hedge fund traders. Ilana Weinstein of the IDW Group, which specializes in hedge fund recruitment, says that the new financial regulation bill has fundamentally changed the supply and demand balance for hedge [...]

Featured Trades: (SUGAR), (SGG), (CZZ), iPath Dow Jones-UBS Sugar Subindex Total Return ETN 3) I'll Take Two Lumps, Please. It's just a matter of time before global buying of the grains spills over into the sugar market. A combination of torrential rains in Brazil, the source of 54% of the world supply, and draughts in [...]

Featured Trades: (HIROSHIMA ANNIVERSARY) 4) A Hiroshima Memorial. Friday was the 65th anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, an event that that has touched me in many ways. I never had any doubt for the need to use the bomb in 1945. My father had orders to join his third marine division in Okinawa for [...]

'There is no fuel left in the tank' said Carter Worth, a technical analyst about the likely failure of the stock market rally.

Featured Trades: (THE SACK OF ROME), (TBT), (TMV) ProShares Ultra Short Lehman 20+ Year Treasury ETF Direxion Daily 30 Year Treasury Bear 3X Shares ETF 1) Get Ready for the Sack of Rome. I traded the great Japanese bull market during the eighties at Morgan Stanley, from the very bottom all the way up to [...]

Featured Trades: (EMERGING MARKETS ARE HOT), (EPOL), (IDX), (ECH), (EWS) iShares MSCI Poland Investable Market ETF Market Vectors Indonesia ETF Singapore iShares ETF iShares MSCI Chile Fund Index ETF 2) Emerging Markets Are on a Tear. Regular readers of this letter know that I have been going on about emerging markets like a broken record [...]

Featured Trades: (YEN), (FXY), (YCS) Currency Shares Japanese Yen Trust ProShares UltraShort Yen ETF 3) What’s Behind the Yen Strength. My old friend Peter Tasker (we both wrote for the late Far Eastern Economic Review in the seventies), ran an interesting editorial in the Financial Times today (click here for the piece). He examines the [...]

Featured Trades: (SQM), (HEV), (ENS), (XIDE), (CHP), (ZBB), (EV) 4) The Skinny on Lithium. Long time readers of this letter know that I have been a huge bull on lithium plays, my pick in the sector, Chile's Sociedad Quimica Y Minera (SQM), bringing in a handy 250% pop off the lows in 2009. You couldn't [...]

'People are finally starting to realize that 'extended period' means 'extended period,' said former University of Chicago professor and former Fed governor Randall Kroszner, about future interest rate expectations.

Featured Trades: (OIL), (NATURAL GAS), (BP), (XOM), (OXY),   1) The Price of Oil is Going Up. I received another scratchy, crackling cell phone call from my drilling buddy in the Texas natural gas fields today. You could almost choke from the dust on the line. He told me that the BP Gulf disaster was [...]

Featured Trades: (FOR PROFIT EDUCATION), (APOL), (COCO), (ESI) 2) The Smoking Gun on For-Profit Education. When I recommended the for-profit education sector as a potential short (click here for ‘Hedge Funds Are Targeting for Profit Education’), I didn’t know that the General Accounting Office was conducting an undercover investigation of several schools. Since then share [...]

Featured Trades: (THE NUCLEAR COMEBACK), (CCJ), (NLR)   3) Nuclear Energy Makes a Comeback. Better drag your leisure suits, bell bottoms, and Bee Gee’s records out the attic. The seventies are about to enjoy a rebirth. The nuclear industry, which has been comatose since the accident at Three Mile Island in 1979, is gearing up [...]