Come join me for lunch at the Mad Hedge Fund Trader’s Global Strategy Update, which I will be conducting in Honolulu, Hawaii on Friday, April 3, 2015. An excellent meal will be followed by a wide-ranging discussion and an extended question and answer period. I’ll be giving you my up to date view on stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities, precious metals and real estate. And to … [Read more...]

The best is yet to come with regards to the US economy, says the Federal Reserve. The oncoming onslaught of positive economic data means that the bull market in stocks will have years to run. The full impact of the Fed’s aggressive five year, $4.5 trillion program of monetary easing will only start to be felt in 2015. Everything up until now has just been a warm up. … [Read more...]

Take those predictions, forecasts, and prognostications with so many grains of salt. They have a notorious track record for being completely wrong, even when made by the leading experts in their fields. In preparing for my autumn lecture series, I came across the following nuggets and thought I’d share them with you. There are some real howlers. 1876  "This 'telephone' has too … [Read more...]

The Opening Bell with Jim Parker Well, you asked for it, and now it is here. You were looking for that extra edge in reading and trading the markets? Well, now it is here, The Opening Bell with Jim Parker. With The Opening Bell, Jim Parker will give an early read on where each day’s market action will take place. He will focus on a dozen or so names where traders are most … [Read more...]

Given the recent difficulty in placing orders in this tedious, illiquid market, I have been inundated with requests for how to execute orders. So I thought I’d take some time today to expound on the basics of order execution 101. There are three basic ways to intelligently get an order into the market: 1) The No Brainer Average In. Buy half at the receipt of the Trade Alert … [Read more...]

Once again, I am writing to you from the poolside cabana B-2 at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. It is a baking hot 100 degrees in the shade and the air is bone-dry, so I’m draining my third rum punch for the day. The days when I risked getting dragged out to the parking lot to get my hands broken with a hammer for card counting at blackjack have long since passed, so I am … [Read more...]

“There is a time to make money, and a time to not lose money. This is one of those times.” That was the insightful gem I came away with after listening to David Tepper speak at the 7th annual SALT Alternative Investment Conference in Las Vegas Nevada. Tepper continued, opining that the markets are “dangerous” here, and that he was “nervous.” “It was easy to buy stocks (SPY), … [Read more...]

I have long had enormous respect for General Colin Powell. My commanding four star general when I was flying errands for the Marine Corps. during Desert Storm, he fights my kind of war; they’re very short, three days in the case of desert storm, and we won. And topping everything else, the Kuwaitis paid for it all. It was the best training exercise I ever enjoyed. General … [Read more...]

When the Dow crashed 514 points in a single day a few years ago, the market lost a staggering $850 billion in market capitalization. High frequency traders were possibly responsible for half of this move, but generated a mere $65 million in profits, some 7/1,000’s of a percent of the total loss. Are market authorities and regulators being penny wise, but pound foolish? The … [Read more...]

I strongly urge readers of this letter to log on to Amazon and by a copy of Options for the Beginner and Beyond by W. Edward Olmstead. Options contracts offer investors a wonderful instrument for minimizing risk, while maximizing the upside, and I am going to recommend many more such strategies in the future. So, if you want to have the slightest idea of what I am talking … [Read more...]

My friend, Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group, a global risk analyst who I regularly follow, has published an outstanding book entitled The End of the Free Markets: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations. I find this highly depressing, as it takes me as long to read one of Ian’s books as it takes him to write another one. To read a review of his highly insightful tome … [Read more...]

I have just finished leisurely reading Tom Standage’s book The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century On-Line Pioneers. Standage discusses the creation and development of the telegraph system and how it revolutionized communication in the nineteenth century. The book claims that Modern Internet users are in many ways the heirs of … [Read more...]

Multinationals, Global development economists and armchair military strategists are all watching with great interest China’s plans to build a Grand Nicaragua Canal. The government in Managua inked a deal with a Hong Kong based consortium in 2013, led by telecommunications magnate Wang Jing, and broke ground on a minor access road on December 22. But that is a very long way … [Read more...]

Having trouble raising capital for your new hedge fund? Just list Warren Buffet as your “Honorary Chairman.” That’s what California prison guard Ottoniel Medrano did. To help his marketing efforts, he also claimed that he had $4.8 billion in assets under management as well as massive real estate holdings somewhere in Asia. Medrano’s International Realty Holdings managed to … [Read more...]

1) Dump all hubris, pretentions and stubbornness. It will only cost you money. 2) The market is always right, even if all the prices appear wrong. 3) Only buy the puke outs and sell the euphoria. Do anything in the middle, and you will get whipsawed. 4) Outright calls and puts are offering a better risk/reward right now than bull and bear vertical call and put spreads, which … [Read more...]

From time to time I receive an email from a subscriber telling me that they are unable to get executions on trade alerts that are as good as the ones I get. There are several possible reasons for this: 1) Markets move, sometimes quite dramatically so. 2) Your Trade Alert email was hung up on your local provider’s server, getting it to you late. This is a function of your … [Read more...]

I know I ran this story only ten days ago, but today was one of those days from hell when I wished that more people signed up for my free Text Alert Service. Yahoo was down in various parts of the country. AWeber, the service provider we use to send out the Trade Alerts by email, was completely down for hours, and initially denied that the problem was at their end. They … [Read more...]

All of the high-grade paper used by the US Treasury to print money is bought from a single firm, Crane & Co., which has been in the same family for seven generations. Last year, the Feds printed 38 million banknotes worth $639 million. Although they have seen the recession cause the velocity of money to decline, recent reflationary efforts have spurred a big increase in … [Read more...]