Featured Trades: (NEW WEBSITE LAUNCH)   1) With much fanfare and celebration, I am happy to announce my new state of the art website for www.madhedgefundtrader.com . The ground up rebuild offers vastly enhanced functionality and ease of use. For a start, the old website, Hedge Fund Radio, and the blog have been consolidated into [...]

2) Gotta Love Those Lean Hogs! Those hapless investors who ignored my advice to sell in May and go away certainly paid the price. Take a look at the chart below of year to date asset class performance showing the shakeup that spring wrought in all its gory detail. The shift last month from green [...]

Featured Trades: (APOL), (COCO), (DV), (CECO), (BPI), (EDMC), (APEI), (WPO), (CPLA), (ESI)   3) Short Sellers Turn an Instant Profit in For-Profit Education. One of the great things about the Internet is that when you put something out there, often what comes back at you is ten times better. Last week I posted a piece [...]

Featured Trades: (BP), (GS), (C), (PFE), (MO), (AAPL) 4) Only Buy Companies You Hate. The Wall Street Journal published one of the funniest investment strategy pieces I have ever read. Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams argues that you should invest in companies you hate because only the most unprincipled and rapacious firms make the greatest profits. [...]

'Technical analysis'¦.has exactly the same scientific validity as pretending you are a witch and forecasting market moves from chicken droppings,' said humorist, Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame.

''Free choice is not relevant in financial markets because there are too many players. A stock with a million holders is much more predictable than one with five,' said Charles Nenner, of Charles Nenner Research in Amsterdam.

Featured Trades: (MAY NONFARM PAYROLL) 1) Where's the Beef? That was the thorny question wracking the brains of investors Friday morning on the heels of the hugely disappointing nonfarm payroll report showing that 430,000 jobs were gained in May. Never mind that this was the best report in several years. The problem arises when you [...]

Featured Trades: (U-HAUL) 2) My Favorite Secret Economic Indicator. It is the end of the school year at the University of California at Berkeley, and the unenviable task of moving my son, a junior, out of his hovel for the summer fell to me. When I arrived, I was stunned to find nothing less than [...]

Featured Trades: (THE WORST TRADE IN HISTORY), (AAPL) 4) The Worst Trade in History. Say you owned 10% of Apple (AAPL) and you sold it for $800 in 1976. What would that stake be worth today? Try $22 billion. That is the harsh reality that Ron Wayne, 76, faces every morning when he wakes up, [...]

'V-shaped recoveries don't have months where we recover only 40,000 jobs,' said Dan Greenhouse, chief economist at bond house Miller Tabak.

Featured Trades: (BP), (THE NUCLEAR OPTION)   1) British Petroleum: The Nuclear Option. I have never been able to use my talents both as a securities analyst and a nuclear weapons designer simultaneously, but British Petroleum (BP) has at last enabled me to rise to the call. Back before personal computers, the Internet, and hedge [...]

Featured Trades: (EDV), (SDS), (UUP), (TBT) Canada iShares Trust ETF Currency Shares Canadian Dollar Trust ETF iPath S&P 500 VIX Short-Term Futures ETN ProShares Ultra Short S&P 500 ETF Vanguard Extended Duration ETF PowerShares DB US Dollar Index Bullish Fund 2) The May ETF Score Card. I always find it useful to review the best [...]

Featured Trades: (CANADA), (FXC), (EWC) Canada iShares Trust ETF Currency Shares Canadian Dollar Trust ETF 3) The Loonie Takes Flight On Bank of Canada Move. The Bank of Canada finally raised interest rates yesterday, the first G-7 country to do so, taking the overnight rate up 0.25% to 0.5%.  The central bank said it took [...]

Featured Trades: (THE ASCENT OF MONEY) 4) The Best Financial Book Ever. I have just finished reading the best financial book ever, and I have read most of them. It is The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Harvard professor Niall Ferguson. It gives you a great explanation of how the [...]