Featured Trades: (THE HARSH REALITIES OF TRADING) 3) It’s Harder Than it Looks. A recent piece at the underground website, Zero Hedge, by one ‘pivotfarm’ resonated with me in explaining how hard it actually is making money in the market (click here for the link). It looks deceptively easy from the outside. You buy a [...]

Featured Trades: (EMERGING MARKET DEBT), (PCY) Invesco PowerShares Emerging Market Sovereign Debt ETF 4) Is Emerging Market Debt the New Prime Credit? Last year, I suggested emerging market sovereign debt ETF’s as safe, high yielding investments in which to hide out in case the equity markets swoon again. The stock market has looked pretty grizzly [...]

In Despicable Me, the latest animated children's' film from 20th Century Fox, the Bank of Evil, used to finance the nefarious deeds of villians, has listed under its name 'formerly known as Lehman Brothers.'

Featured Trades: (EUROPEAN BANK STRESS TESTS), (EURO), (FXE) Currency Shares Euro Trust ETF 1) Give All the European Banks 'A's'. A favorite ploy of poorly managed school districts in California is for the teachers to simply give all their students 'A's'. That way the state and federal money keeps rolling in, and demanding parents can [...]

Featured Trades: (2012 LONDON OLYMPICS) 2) Guess Who’s Bailing Out the 2012 Olympics? Where is the 2012 London Olympics turning to meet gargantuan cost overruns? None other than BP, which is going the extra mile to burnish its tarnished image. With the British economy mired in a vicious financial crisis, many are wondering if hosting [...]

Featured Trades: (THE ECONOMIST ‘BIG MAC’ INDEX) 3) Where The Economist ‘Big Mac’ Index Finds Currency Value. My former employer, The Economist, once the ever tolerant editor of my flabby, disjointed, and juvenile prose (Thanks Peter and Marjorie), has just released its ‘Big Mac’ index of international currency valuations (click here for the link). Although [...]

'You ever wonder why fund managers can't beat the S&P 500? It's because they're sheep,' said Gordon Gecko in the classic film, Wall Street.

Featured Trades: (THE NEW DEFLATION) 2) The New Deflation Definition. It seems that all you hear about these days is deflation. That is certainly what the bond market is telling us, with my screen blaring at me a miserable 2.93% yield for the ten year Treasury bond. But there is a new definition for this [...]

Featured Trades: (TURKEY), (TUR), (TKC), (TURKISH LIRA) iShares MSCI Turkey Investable Market Index Fund ETF   1) Turkey Is On The Menu. The boarding of a Turkish ship by Israeli commandos and the international brouhaha that it sparked has thrown a searing spotlight on that emerging nation. Several hedge fund friends and now a few [...]

Featured Trades: (FXI), (COCOA), (CHOCOLATE), (NIB) iPath Dow Jones-UBS Cocoa Subindex Total Return ETN 2) Hedge Fund Corners the Cocoa Market. That Hershey bar you've been sneaking out to buy on breaks is about to cost you a lot more. London based Anthony Ward's Amajaro hedge fund built up a billion dollar long position in [...]

Featured Trades: (THE NEXT 100 YEARS) 3) What Will the World Look Like in 100 Years? George Friedman, geopolitical forecaster and founder of the Austin, Texas based private intelligence firm, Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor) (click here for the link at https://www.stratfor.com/ ), delivers a fascinating list of future political, military, and economic scenarios in his new [...]

'Companies are not saving cash for a rainy day, but a rainy decade,' said Tanya Beder, chairman of SBCC Consulting.

Featured Trades: (POT), (MON)   4) More on the Grains. I managed to catch an interview with Charlie Rentschler at New York boutique investment bank, Morgan Joseph, one of the top agricultural analysts in the industry, known as the ‘Farmer from Harvard.’ He says that investment in the sector is a frustrating and unpredictable mix [...]

'There is no such thing as an isolated economy anymore,' said Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Featured Trades: (AMZN), (KINDLE)   1)  Amazon Conquers All With the Kindle. I knew Jeff Bezos back in the eighties as this always cheerful quant in Morgan Stanley’s bond department who had this incredibly annoying laugh.  He blew us all away when he took off on his own, used innovative technology to discover the immense [...]