In the words of United States Army General, Creighton Abrams, “When eating an elephant, take one bite at a time.”
In the words of United States Army General, Creighton Abrams, “When eating an elephant, take one bite at a time.”
Global Market Comments
June 30, 2023
Fiat Lux
Featured Trades:
(TAKING OFF FOR THE 2023 MAD HEDGE EUROPEAN TOUR)
CLICK HERE to download today’s position sheet.
By the time you read this, I will be on a flight to New York City where I will meet with Concierge clients and host my Strategy Luncheon.
I will eventually end up at my chalet in Zermatt, Switzerland where I traditionally restart my year. Weather permitting, I will climb the 14,692-foot Matterhorn again. Is it seven times this year, or eight? I can’t remember.
Otherwise, I’ll rejoin Zermatt Search and Rescue again visiting old friends and pulling stranded Americans off of Alpine peaks. It seems I’m the only one up there who has a sense of humor and speaks English.
I leave you with a “mission accomplished.” We are closing out the first half up +64.39% so far in 2023. If all three remaining positions expire at max profit, we will be up +66.40%.
While most investors are only slowly becoming aware that we are in a bull market, you got the heads-up last October. Since the October 13 low, Mad Hedge has gained an awesome +76.15%! This is a year when a lot of people are wrong and YOU are right.
I have worked the hardest in my life the past year, and it is time for a break. I have also put myself through the most grueling training regimen ever, hiking 2,000 miles in torrential rains and snowshoeing another 600, all with a 50-pound pack.
Covid took a lot out of me in 2022.
Every year, it seems to get harder to keep the calendar at bay.
Getting out into the real world and soaking up new data and opinions is invaluable in shaping my own global view, and your performance benefits from it.
I will be traveling with my laptop and keeping in touch with the markets. While 18th century Internet service is passable, the bandwidth can be snail-like. So, unless I see something extraordinary, I will cut back on new Trade Alerts.
I never actually STOP working, I just change my office location from home offices in Incline Village and San Francisco, to a French castle, and Italian villa, or a Mediterranean mega yacht.
So, I deserve a break. I am risking over trading. I need to spend some time alone on a mountaintop, communing with the spirits, attempting to discover the new long-term market trends hiding themselves in the mist.
While on the road, I will continue writing my newsletter, giving you my daily dose of market insight. I will also be re-running some of my favorite research pieces from the past when my travel schedule does not allow Internet access.
This is to expose my thousands of new subscribers to the golden oldies and to remind the legacy readers who have since forgotten them.
I will be back in San Francisco in early August, glued to my screens once again for another year of toil in the salt mines. In the meantime, please feel free to email me. Concierge members can call me any time for free on WhatsApp.
In the meantime, I shall be raising a glass to all of you at dinner, the loyal readers of The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader. Salute! Prost! Kampai, and Cheers! Thanks for making this letter a huge success!
If you want to take the opportunity to meet me in person, please find my strategy luncheon schedule below. To purchase tickets for the luncheons, please go to my online store and click on the country and city of your choice.
Thursday, July 6, 12:00 PM New York City
Thursday, July 13, 12:00 PM Seminar at Sea on the Queen Mary II
Thursday, July 19, 12:00 PM London England
Friday, July 27, 3:00 PM Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy
Thursday, August 1, 12:00 PM Florence Italy
Thursday, August 4, 12:00 PM Vienna Austria
Saturday, August 5, 12:00 PM Rome Italy
I look forward to seeing you there, and thanks for supporting my research.
John Thomas
CEO & Publisher
Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader
Mad Hedge Market Timing Index
Now Which One of These is for Austria?
Global Market Comments
June 29, 2023
Fiat Lux
Featured Trades:
(SATURDAY, AUGUST 5, 2023 ROME, ITALY STRATEGY LUNCHEON)
(MY 2022 LEAPS TRACK RECORD),
(FCX), (PANW), (RIVN), (NVDA), (BRKB), (JPM), (MS), (VRTX), (TLT), (GOLD), (SLV), (TSLA)
CLICK HERE to download today’s position sheet.
Recently, I have been touting a 2022 track record of +84.63%.
I have a confession to make.
I lied.
In actual fact, my performance was far higher than that. In reality, I generated a multiple of that +84.63% figure.
That is because my published performance is only for my front-month short-term trade alerts. It does not include the LEAPS recommendations (Long Term Equity Anticipation Securities) issued in 2022, the details of which I include below.
LEAPS have the identical structure as a front month vertical bull call debit spread. The only difference is that while front-month call spreads have expiration dates of less than 30 days, LEAPS go out to 18-30 months.
LEAPS also have strike prices far out of-the-money instead of deep in-the-money, giving you infinitely more upside leverage. LEAPS are actually synthetic futures contracts on the underlying stock.
Of the 12 LEAPS executed in 2022, eight made money and four lost. But the successful trades win big, up to 1,260% in the case of NVDIA (NVDA). With the losers, you only write off the money you put up.
And you still have 18 months until expiration for my four losers, ample time for them to turn around and make money. In the case of my biggest loser for Rivian (RIVN), Tesla launched an unprecedented EV price way shortly after I added this position. Never take on Tesla in a price war. Black swans happen.
Of course, timing is everything in this business. I only add LEAPS during major market selloffs as the leverage is so great, over 20X in some cases, of which there were four in 2022.
If you would like to receive more extensive coverage of my LEAPS service, please sign up for the Mad Hedge Concierge Service where you can excess a separate website devoted entirely to LEAPS. Be aware that the Concierge Service is by application only, has a limited number of places, and there is usually a waiting list.
Given the numbers below, it is easy to understand why most professional full-time traders only invest their personal retirement funds in LEAPS.
To learn more about the Mad Hedge Concierge Service, please contact customer support at support@madhedgefundtrader.com
2022 LEAPS Track Record
Date Position Cost Price Profit
9/27/2022 (FCX) January 2025 $42-$45 Call spread LEAPS $0.65 $1.26 94%
9/28/2022 (PANW) January 2025 $306.67-$313.33 Call spread LEAPS $0.80 $4.42 453%
9/28/2022 (RIVN) January 2025 $75-$80 Call spread LEAPS $0.50 $0.06 -88%
9/29/2022 (NVDA) January 2025 $270-$280 Call spread LEAPS $0.50 $6.80 1,260%
9/30/2022 (BRK/B) January 2025 $420-$430 Call spread LEAPS $1.00 $1.95 95%
10/3/2022 (JPM) January 2025 $175-$180 Call spread LEAPS $0.50 $0.89 78%
10/4/2022 (MS) January 2025 $130-$135 Call spread LEAPS $0.50 $0.24 -52%
10/12/2022 (VRTX) January 2025 $430-$440 Call spread LEAPS $1.50 $2.76 84%
11/9/2022 (TLT) January 2024 $95-$100 Call spread LEAPS $2.30 $3.51 53%
11/10/2022 (GOLD) January 2025 $27-$30 Call spread LEAPS $0.25 $0.18 -28%
11/28/2022 (SLV) January 2025 $25-$26 Call spread LEAPS $0.50 $0.22 -56%
12/19/2022 (TSLA) January 2025 $290-$300 Call spread LEAPS $1.50 $2.94 96%
Good luck and good trading,
John Thomas
CEO & Publisher
The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader
The Sweet Taste of LEAPS
We spend a lot of time looking for systemic risk; in truth, however, it tends to find us,” said Meg McConnell of the New York Fed.
Global Market Comments
June 28, 2023
Fiat Lux
Featured Trades:
(TUESDAY, AUGUST 1, 2023 FLORENCE, ITALY GLOBAL STRATEGY LUNCHEON)
(CYBERSECURITY IS ONLY JUST GETTING STARTED)
(PANW), (HACK), (CSCO), (FTNT), (JNPR), (CIBR)
CLICK HERE to download today’s position sheet.
One of the unfortunate aspects of the pandemic has been a tenfold increase in online fraud.
I get a dozen phishing attacks a day pretending to be Walmart, the Bank of America, and Amazon. And I never click on anything from Apple asking me to change my ID and password. The crooks are just getting too good.
However, where there are criminals there is investment gold.
The cybersecurity sector has been spurred upward with the rest of technology in recent months, creating a rare entry point on the cheap side of the longer-term charts.
The near-destruction of Sony (SNE) by North Korean hackers years ago has certainly put the fear of God into corporate America. Apparently, they have no sense of humor whatsoever north of the 38th parallel.
As a result, there is a generational upgrade in cybersecurity underway, with many potential targets boosting spending by multiples.
It’s not often that I get a stock recommendation from an army general. That is exactly what happened the other day when I was speaking to a three-star about the long-term implications of the escalating trade war.
He argued persuasively that the world will probably never again see large-scale armies fielded by major industrial nations. Wars of the future will be fought online, as they have been silently and invisibly over the past 20 years.
All of those trillions of dollars spent on big ticket, heavy metal weapons systems, like submarines and F-35 fighters ($122 million each) are pure pork designed by politicians to buy voters in marginal swing states.
The money would be far better spent where it is most needed, on the cyber warfare front. Needless to say, my friend shall remain anonymous.
The problem is that when wars become cheaper, you fight more of them, as is the case with online combat.
You probably don’t know this, but during the Bush administration, the Chinese military downloaded the entire contents of the Pentagon’s mainframe computers at least seven times.
This was a neat trick because these computers were in stand-alone, siloed, electromagnetically shielded facilities not connected to the Internet in any way. Here are essentially no secrets about anything anymore.
In the process, they obtained the designs of all of our most advanced weapons systems, including our best smart nukes. What have they done with this top-secret information?
Absolutely nothing.
Like many in senior levels of the US military, the Chinese have concluded that these weapons are a useless waste of valuable resources. Far better value for money are more hackers, coders, and servers, which the Chinese have pursued with a vengeance.
You have seen this in the substantial tightening up of the Chinese Internet through the deployment of the Great Firewall, which blocks local access to most foreign websites, including Wikipedia.
Try sending an email to someone in the middle Kingdom with a Gmail address. It is almost impossible. This is why Google (GOOG) closed their offices there years ago.
I know of these because several Chinese readers are complaining that they are unable to open my own Mad Hedge Trade Alerts, or access their foreign online brokerage accounts.
As a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff recently told me, “The greatest threat to national defense is wasting money on national defense.”
Although my brass-hatted friend didn’t mention the company by name, the implication is that I need to go out and buy Palo Alto Networks (PANW) right now.
Palo Alto Networks, Inc. is an American network security company based in Santa Clara, California just across the water from my Bay area office.
The company’s core products are advanced firewalls designed to provide network security, visibility and granular control of network activity based on application, user, and content identification. To visit their website please click here.
Palo Alto Networks competes in the unified threat management and network security industry against Cisco (CSCO), FireEye (FEYE), Fortinet (FTNT), Check Point (CHKP), Juniper Networks (JNPR), and Cyberoam, among others.
The really interesting thing about this industry is that there really are no losers. That’s because companies are taking a layered approach to cybersecurity, parceling out contracts to many of the leading firms at once, looking to hedge their bets.
To say that top management has no idea what these products really do would be a huge understatement. Therefore, they buy all of them.
This makes a basket approach to the industry more feasible than usual. You can do this by buying the $435 million capitalized Pure Funds ISE Cyber Security ETF (HACK), which boasts CyberArk Software (CYBR and FireEye (FEYE) as its largest positions.
(HACK) has been a hedge fund favorite since the Sony attack.
For more information about (HACK), please click here.
And don’t forget to change your password.
“Technology has outrun the ability of the market to handle it. When the next bear market comes, there could be a messy affair,” said my friend and client Leon Cooperman of hedge fund Omega Advisors.
Global Market Comments
June 27, 2023
Fiat Lux
Featured Trades:
(LAST CHANCE TO ATTEND THE THURSDAY, JULY 6 NEW YORK STRATEGY LUNCHEON)
(A BUY WRITE PRIMER), (AAPL)
CLICK HERE to download today’s position sheet.
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