Featured Trades: (MY HOLLYWOOD ROLE) 1) Hollywood Cashes in on Wall Street's Woes. I have done many things in my life: hedge fund manager, pilot, cowboy, journalist, stock broker, mountain climber, translator, guide, etc, etc. etc. Now add technical consultant to Hollywood to the list. According to the New York Times, Simon Baker, star of [...]

Featured Trades: (TESLA MOTORS), (TSLA) 2) Tesla: Sell the Sizzle, Then Buy the Steak. So far, the most successful thing Tesla Motors (TSLA) has done is sell stock. The IPO was an absolute blowout success, far and away the best this year, with book building at $14-$16, the size increased by 20%, pricing at $17, [...]

Featured Trades: (RHODIUM), (AAUKY.PK), (PAL), (SWC)   3) Pssst! Have You Heard About’.? When I was at the New York Hard Asset Investment Conference weeks ago, every hour someone would stop by my table, mention the word ‘rhodium’, and walk away. My interest piqued, I decided to look into this mysterious metal. Rhodium (Rh) is [...]

Featured Trades: (LAS VEGAS CITY CENTER) 4) A Poolside Report from City Center. I write this to you from my poolside cabana at the Aria at City Center, the newest and hottest hotel in Las Vegas, against a background of blaring rock music and helicopters buzzing overhead every five minutes. It's amazing what passes for [...]

'People are starting to feel better here. They don't feel like they have to have Dr. Kevorkian on speed dial anymore,' said Scott Nation, president of Nation Shares.

Featured Trades: (RESIDENTIAL REAL ESTATE)   1) Don’t Hold Your Breath for Residential Real Estate. Every few weeks I get a warm and fuzzy feeling when I see my old house for sale in the Wall Street Journal. I’m sure you’ve seen it. It’s the 8,500 square foot, four bedroom, seven bathroom white elephant perched [...]

Featured Trades: (ETHANOL), (CORN), (SOYBEANS) 2) The Great Ethanol Boondoggle. One of my biggest disappointments with Obama so far is his continued support of the ethanol boondoggle. The program was ramped up by the Bush administration to achieve energy independence by subsidizing the production of alcohol from domestically grown corn. Add clean burning moonshine (yes, [...]

Featured Trades: (DINOSAUR TURDS) 3) 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. [...]

Featured Trades: (STRUCTURAL UNEMPLOYMENT), (FXI), (EWY), (VNM), (PIN) 4) How US Job Losses Will End. I am not in the habit of regularly lifting data out of the Wall Street Journal, but even a blind squirrel occasionally finds an acorn. I was tempted by the comparative Asian wage data they published, which I just have [...]

'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: (SAN FRANCISCO HARD ASSET CONFERENCE), (GOLD), (SILVER), (PLATINUM), (PALLADIUM), (GLD), (SLV), (PPLT), (PALL)   1) The San Francisco Hard Asset Conference. Attending the San Francisco Hard Asset Investment Conference this week, I learned that the people who inhabit this world are different from you and I. They camp in remote, mosquito infested swamps, [...]

Featured Trades: (NISSAN LEAF), (NSANY), (F) 2) Taking a Nissan Leaf Out for a Spin. After five years of waiting, I finally got to drive the dream car of the future, the 2011 all-electric Nissan Leaf at the San Francisco auto show. Pulling a few strings with CEO Carlos Ghosn landed me a VIP test [...]

Featured Trades: (ASSET ALLOCATION) 3) What About Asset Allocation? Asset allocation is the one question that I get every day which I absolutely cannot answer. The reason is simple: no two investors are alike. The answer varies whether you are young or old, have $1,000 in the bank or $10 million, are a sophisticated investor [...]

Featured Trades: (GURUS) 4) There Are No Gurus. If there was ever an argument that you should rely on independent newsletters for guidance about financial markets, such as The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader, and not traditional brokerage houses, take a look at the chart below from JP Morgan. It shows that despite [...]

'The banks are effectively zombie banks, because their consumer and commercial assets are not growing and their fee businesses are getting crushed. You're looking at very low return vehicles,' said Meredith Whitney, CEO of the Meredith Whitney Advisory Group.