'Banks have turned into gigantic gambling institutions. You never know what you own. I wouldn't touch them if you pointed a gun to my head,' said legendary hedge fund manager Bill Fleckenstein on Hedge Fund Radio.

Featured Trades: (JANUARY NONFARM PAYROLL)   1) Reading the Nonfarm Payroll Tea Leaves. Lifetime followers of the monthly nonfarm payroll report were more than a little amused by the Friday numbers, which could not have been more contradictory, conflicting, and confusing. The headline figure showed a gain of a paltry 36,000, yet the unemployment rate [...]

Featured Trades: (CHINA VERSUS INDIA), (FXI), (TTM), (INP), (PIN), (EPI) 2) India is Catching Up With China. When I first visited Calcutta in 1976, more than 800,000 people were sleeping on the sidewalks, I was hauled everywhere by a very lean, barefoot rickshaw driver, and drinking the water out of a tap was tantamount to [...]

Featured Trades: (NISSAN LEAF), (NSANY) 3) Getting Something for Nothing. I just contracted to buy all the gasoline I want at 14 cents a gallon. No, I have not struck oil in my backyard, or come into an inheritance from a long lost Kuwaiti relative. That is the de facto price that PG&E is billing [...]

'If you can get a dividend higher than the yield on ten year debt, it's an opportunity we haven't seen in our lifetime. On a five year horizon, investing in large multinationals with high dividends will have a large payday' said Lawrence Fink, CEO of BlackRock.

Featured Trades: (RESIDENTIAL REAL ESTATE) 1) Years of Pain to Come in Residential Real Estate. Regular readers of this letter are familiar with my antipathy towards real estate of every flavor, with the exceptions of multi-unit dwellings (apartment buildings) and farmland . So my interest was piqued when Ron Peltier spoke the other day, the [...]

Featured Trades: (HEDGE FUNDS) 2) Who Says Hedge Funds Aren't Adding Value? According to my old friend, Rick Sopher, chairman of LCH Investments in London, the top ten hedge funds have earned $153 billion for their investors since inception. John Paulson's fund alone, which made an absolute killing by shorting subprime mortgage debt instruments going [...]

Featured Trades: (ETHANOL) 3) The Great Ethanol Boondoggle. One of my biggest disappointments with the Obama administration 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: (MURRAY SAYLE) 4) Murray Sayle: The Passing of a Giant in Journalism. I was saddened to hear of the death of my close friend, the Australian, Murray Sayle, after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease at the age of 84. Murray was one of the giants of journalism in the second half of [...]

'I'm sure there are gobs and gobs of money to be made in emerging markets,' said legendary hedge fund manager Bill Fleckenstein on Hedge Fund Radio.

Featured Trades: (ORLANDO STRATEGY LUNCHEON)   1) Last Chance to Sign Up for The Mad Hedge Fund Trader February 11 Orlando Strategy Luncheon. Come join me for lunch for the Mad Hedge Fund Trader’s Global Strategy Update, which I will be conducting in Orlando, Florida on Friday, February 11, 2011. A three course lunch will [...]

Featured Trades: (DYING INDUSTRIES TO AVOID) 2) Industries You Will Never Hear From Me About. The focus of this letter is to show people how to make money through investing in fast growing, highly profitable companies which have stiff, long term macroeconomic winds at their backs. That means I ignore a large part of the [...]

Featured Trades: (SOLAR ENERGY PARITY), (FSLR) 3) Solar Energy is Poised to Achieve Cost Parity. After two years of relentless cost, the solar industry is about to reach the Holy Grail of parity with the cost of conventional power sources at around 10 cents per kilowatt hour, paving the way for and exponential growth in [...]

'A central bank is best that governs least, but is prepared to govern radically when called upon,' said 19th century man of letters, Walter Bagehot, an early editor of The Economist

Featured Trades: (THE YEAR OF THE RABBIT), (FXI), (SSEC), (CYB) 1) Ringing in the Year of the Rabbit. An invitation to the Chinese consulate for their New Year’s party is always one of the most sought after invitations in the Lilliputan diplomatic community of San Francisco. Welcoming the Year of the Rabbit were true Mandarins [...]