SPECIAL FLORIDA ISSUE Featured Trades: (DESPAIR IN CELEBRATION) 3) They're Not Celebrating in Celebration. A search for a nearby bank took me to the surreal suburb of Celebration, Florida, a city developed by the Disney people during the mid-1990's. Created to evoke small town USA circa 1940, the berg tastefully replicates an America from the [...]

'It's very difficult to navigate a business through a paradigm shift. You must hard wire your system to second guess all the time, questioning what is next, and then what is next. You've got to retain optionality for both investment portfolios and the business you run to navigate this well,' said Mohamed El-Erian, co-chairman of [...]

Featured Trades: (INFLATION STARTS HERE!) 1) Buy the Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader Now and Beat My Price Increase. Those of you who have been sitting on the fence, hemming and hawing as to whether you should subscribe to The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader, now is your time to move. [...]

Featured Trades: (DINNER WITH JOSEPH STIGLITZ) 2) Dinner With Joseph Stiglitz . The great thing about interviewing Joseph Stiglitz over dinner is that you don’t have to ask any questions.  You just turn him on and he spits out one zinger after another. And he does this in a kibitzing, wizened, grandfatherly manner like one [...]

Featured Trades: (APPLE AND STEVE WOZNIAK) 3) The Inside Story on Apple's Steve Wozniak. I first spoke to Steve Wozniak via HAM radio when I was 12 and he was the 14 year old president of the Homestead High School Radio Club in Cupertino, California. With seven children, my dad was pretty stingy with allowance [...]

Featured Trades: (PARIS STRATEGY LUNCHEON) 1) April 8 Paris Strategy Luncheon. Come join me for lunch for the Mad Hedge Fund Trader’s Global Strategy Update, which I will be conducting in Paris on Friday, April 8, 2011. A three course lunch will be followed by a 45 minute PowerPoint presentation and a 45 minute question [...]

Featured Trades: (CHINA'S ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT) 2) China's Long and Winding Road. I spent the evening speaking to Gao Jie, a Beijing civil judge who left the bench to join China's growing environmental movement when her kids came home from school one day coughing and wheezing. You only have to inhale in the capitol city these [...]

Featured Trades: (DEFENSE LANGUAGE INSTITUTE) A Conversation With the Boots on the Ground. I have spent many hours speaking at length with the generals who are running our wars in the Middle East, like David Petraeus, and James E. Cartwright. To get the boots on the ground view, I attended the graduation of a friend [...]

Featured Trades: (REAL ESTATE IN 2030) 1) The Real Estate Market in 2030. A number of analysts, and even some of those in the real estate industry, are finally coming around to the depressing conclusion that there will never be a recovery in residential real estate. Long time readers of this letter know too well [...]

Featured Trades: (THE ONE BRIGHT SPOT IN REAL ESTATE) 3) The One Bright Spot in Real Estate. After my weekly dump on residential real estate, I feel obliged to reveal one corner of this beleaguered market that might actually make sense. By 2050 the population of California will soar from 37 million to 50 million, [...]

'There is one peculiarity about mass psychology in that when you are in a bubble, you can't see it. Bubbles are invisible when you are inside the bubble,' said the charming Jim Dines, of The Dines Letter.

Featured Trades: (VACATION HOMES) 1) Think Again Before Buying That Vacation Home. If you're entertaining buying a vacation home any time soon, I'd think again. In my annual review of the residential real estate market in the High Sierra mountain hamlet of Incline Village, Nevada, and I am sad to report that antidepressant addiction among [...]

Featured Trades: (PETER DRUCKER ON MANAGEMENT) 2) Peter F. Drucker on Management. If you have been living in a cave for the last 71 years and missed the work of management guru, Peter F. Drucker, here is your chance to catch up. I just finished reading The Essential Drucker, a weighty tome of 368 pages [...]

Featured Trades: (THE COMING TAKEOVER WARS) 3) The Coming Takeover Wars. The spate of takeover bids we have witnessed recently, the attempted BHP Billiton (BHP)-Potash (POT) deal, the Sanofi Aventis (SNY)-Genzyme (GENZ) deal, and Intel’s (INTC) acquisition of Infineon Technologies (IFX), is telling the rest of us reams about the broader market. Virtually all of [...]

Featured Trades: (BE CAREFUL WHO YOU SNITCH ON) 4) Be Careful Who You Snitch On. Buried in the recently passed Dodd-Frank financial reform bill are massive financial rewards for turning in your boss. The SEC is hoping that multimillion dollar rewards amounting to 10%-30% of sanction amounts will drive a stampede of whistleblowers to their [...]