Featured Trades: (DINOSAUR MARKET) 4) 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. [...]

'It's time to go back to the old ways. This world of transaction based banking, where algorithms trade umpteen shares in microseconds, would have appalled (British banker from the thirties to the seventies), Sigmund Warburg. We ought to go back to relationship based banking,' said The Ascent of Money author and Harvard business school professor, [...]

  Featured Trades: (BP), (CHK), (DVN)   1) Oil Patch Gossip About BP. Over the years, I have invested so much time wildcatting in the oil patch that I will never be wanting for great steaks at Nick & Sam’s in Dallas, skyboxes at Cowboys games, and personally signed 8 X 10 glossy photographs of [...]

Featured Trades: (NATURAL GAS) 2) Natural Gas Indigestion. I always thought that a great strategy for a new hedge fund would be to only buy positions from existing hedge funds that were blowing up. That fund would buy securities subject to margin calls and distressed liquidations, which are by definition at six standard deviation extremes. [...]

Featured Trades: (WFC), (UNP), (ISE), (ICE) 3) Buy Those Who Sell Shovels, Not Miners. A careful study of the history of California's 1849 gold rush shows that while almost all the miners went broke, those who provided the picks, shovels, transportation, and banking services made the real money. Those fortunes became so vast, they live [...]

Featured Trades:  (CHINESE YUAN FOLLOW UP), (BTU), (FCX), (X), (FXI), (YCS), (YEN) iShares FTSE/Xinhua 25 China ETF ProShares Ultra Short Yen ETF 4) What The Yuan Realignment Means For You. Since it’s rare that we get a realignment as significant as the revaluation of the Chinese Yuan, I thought it would be interesting to review [...]

'$200 down is going to hit before $50 up,' said Tom O'Brien, Editor of the Gold Report, warning about how much scrap the gold for cash business is generating.

Featured Trades: (CHINESE YUAN) Wisdom Tree Dreyfus Chinese Yuan Fund ETF iShares FTSE/Xinhua China 25 ETF   1) Special Chinese Yuan Revaluation Issue. Specifically, China has announced that it will ‘further reform the RMB exchange rate regime and enhance RMB exchange rate flexibility.’ To me, this is Chinese for ‘let it go up.’ If you [...]

Featured Trades: (RESIDENTIAL REAL ESTATE), (DHI), (PHM), (LEN)   2) Here Comes the Double Dip in Housing. The great thing about the residential real estate market is that it floods us with tons of hard data. The bad news is that all of these tea leaves have again started pointing to a turn for the [...]

Featured Trades: (FXA), (FXC), (AUSTRALIAN DOLLAR), (AUSIE/YEN CROSS), (AUSIE/EURO CROSS) Currency Shares Australian Dollar Trust ETF Currency Shares Canadian Dollar Trust ETF 3) ‘Waltzing Matilda’ Hits the Top Ten. The Russian Central bank today said it is moving a portion of its reserves into Australian (FXA) and Canadian dollars (FXC). They join a procession of [...]

Featured Trades: (TRANSOCEAN), (RIG) 4) Time to Cash in on the RIG Bounce? Those who took my advice to buy Transocean (RIG) at $52 can now get out with a 5% profit. The addition of the Swiss based company's shares to that country's stock index created a temporary boost as funds loaded up to track [...]

'Nowadays, people know the price of everything and the value of nothing,' said Irish playwright, poet, and novelist, Oscar Wilde.

Featured Trades: (SPX)   1) The Summer Rally is Here. Now that we are above the 200 day moving average, it looks like our summer rally has begun. But don’t expect too much. After delivering a neat triple bottom at 1,040, the S&P 500 has been grinding up in a low volume rally, complaining and [...]

Featured Trades: (VNM), (FXI), (PIN), (EWY) 2) 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 yesterday, which I just have to [...]

3) Please Use My Free Data Base Search. The original purpose of this letter was to build a data base of ideas to draw on in the management of my hedge fund. When a certain trade comes into play, I merely type in the symbol, name, currency, or commodity into the search box, and the [...]