Global Market Comments
June 24, 2013
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(JUNE 26 GLOBAL STRATEGY WEBINAR),
(JULY 12 AMSTERDAM STRATEGY LUNCHEON),
(THE BEST FINANCIAL BOOK EVER),
(A DAY WITH TOM FRIEDMAN OF THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Come join John Thomas for lunch at the Mad Hedge Fund Trader?s Global Strategy Update, which I will be conducting in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, on Friday, July 12, 2013. A three-course lunch will be followed by a PowerPoint presentation and an extended question and answer period.
I?ll be giving you my up to date view on stocks, bonds, foreign currencies, commodities, precious metals, and real estate. And to keep you in suspense, I?ll be throwing a few surprises out there too. Enough charts, tables, graphs, and statistics will be thrown at you to keep your ears ringing for a week. Tickets are available for $229.
The lunch will be held at a downtown Amsterdam hotel near Nieumarkt that will be emailed with your purchase confirmation.
I look forward to meeting you, and thank you for supporting my research. To purchase tickets for the luncheons, please go to my online store.
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 broad sweep of history delivered us to the doorstep of today?s crisis.
Ferguson starts with an ancient accounting system written on clay tablets in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago, and then takes us through the economic dominance of Greece and Rome. We learn about a medieval Italian diplomat named Fibonacci, who imported advanced mathematical concepts from the Middle East, which we still trade around today. He plots the rise of the great banking dynasties, such as the Medici?s and the Rothschild?s (Jacob was my neighbor in London).
It is also a pot boiling narrative of the great financial scandals, starting with the Mississippi bubble, which wrecked the government of France, the South Sea bubble, where Sir Isaac Newton lost his shirt, to the Ponzi schemes of the 20th century. The story tells us how the financial center of the world has migrated from Babylon to Cairo, Rome, Venice, Amsterdam, London, and eventually ending up in a hedge fund dominated New York.
Ferguson is particularly astute in explaining in layman?s terms the borrowing binge and the exotic, super leveraged derivatives that lead to the current crash. The author finishes with an explanation of how American overconsumption is financed by Chinese saving, and why this can?t last. If you are looking for a single tome which ties it all together, this is it. To obtain preferential pricing in the purchase of this book, please click here.
I took a day off to attend the New York Times Global Forum at San Francisco?s Sony Metreon Center. Their goal was to put together 400 of the most forward thinking and influential minds in the Bay Area, stand back, and see what happened.
It was organized by my old friend, fellow traveler, and veteran journalist, Tom Friedman. Tom and I date back to the old days in Beirut, during their vicious civil war in the early eighties, when working as a journalist meant not knowing if you would wake up the next morning.
Tom worked for the old United Press International, and I for the still prospering Economist. Our mutual friend, the Associated Press?s Terry Anderson, was kidnapped out of his apartment and held hostage by Shiite Hezbollah militants for five years, an ordeal he described in chilling detail in his book, Den of Lions.
You know Tom as the controversial and kibitzing resident of the Times Op-Ed page. He popularized the concepts of globalization and a flat world in a series of groundbreaking, best selling books, including The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, and That Used To Be Us.
I managed to speak to dozens of guests and gained a fascinating read from many different viewpoints of our long-term future. I shall try to distill what I learned in a few lines without any particular attribution. I am always shopping for a new framework with which to view our rapidly evolving planet, and I was not disappointed.
The merger of globalization and information technology has been the most important development this century. The new hyper connectivity is changing the world at a breakneck speed that few understand.
In the days of old, you needed an entire country to impact the global economy. Then, only a corporation was required, starting with the Dutch East India Company. Now, all it takes is a laptop computer or smart phone with a broadband connection.
Several disparate trends came together during the nineties to enable this revolution. The PC made possible the authoring of content in digital form. The Internet distributed it globally for free. Work flow software allowed the residents of this a potential Tower of Babel to seamlessly talk to other. Google gave us unlimited free search, permitting us to all find each other.
A dozen years ago, 4G was a parking space, Skype was a typo, the cloud was in the sky, Twitter was a sound, Facebook didn?t exist, and big data was a rap group. Today, the collapse of storage costs has ushered in big data and super empowered innovators. High speed Internet is even available at the summit of Mount Everest. If the entire world were a math class, the grading curve has just risen for everyone. ?Average? is officially dead.
When Tom?s predecessor, James Reston, went to the office 30 years ago, he wondered what his seven competitors at the major national newspapers would write that day. Now Tom wonders what his 70 million competitors will write. He is writing for the readers in Chengdu as much as he is writing for the ones in Chicago.
Employment prospects for kids these days are particularly challenging. They have to be innovation ready and not job ready. In fact, the whole concept of a ?job? is rapidly dying out. People have to think like newly landed immigrants: unconnected, hungry, and paranoid, but still optimists.
We need to always be in ?beta? mode, endlessly improving your value added to the global economy. The moment you think you?re finished, you are really finished. A lot of people will tell you how to invest your 401k, but no one will tell you how to invest in yourself. The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader is one of the few resources that does this, teaching readers how to prosper in the financial markets independent of the establishment.
The US will not cut or spend its way out of the current economic malaise. It will invent its way out. An accelerating rate of innovation will eventually soak up our current excess workers. America is now the place where everyone around the world comes to launch their moonshot. That is great for business, and explains the tidal wave of new capital pouring into this country. In the meantime, we need to bolster our safety nets, like Medicare and Social Security, as they will be in much greater demand in this independent world.
I will write more about the conference in coming days, with carve outs on specific topics. The outlook for technology is truly unbelievable.
Two Old Warhorses
As a potentially profitable opportunity presents itself, John will send you an alert with specific trade information as to what should be bought, when to buy it, and at what price. Read more
As a potentially profitable opportunity presents itself, John will send you an alert with specific trade information as to what should be bought, when to buy it, and at what price. This is your chance to ?look over? John Thomas? shoulder as he gives you unparalleled insight on major world financial trends BEFORE they happen. Read more
As a potentially profitable opportunity presents itself, John will send you an alert with specific trade information as to what should be bought, when to buy it, and at what price. Read more
As a potentially profitable opportunity presents itself, John will send you an alert with specific trade information as to what should be bought, when to buy it, and at what price. This is your chance to ?look over? John Thomas? shoulder as he gives you unparalleled insight on major world financial trends BEFORE they happen. Read more
Global Market Comments
June 21, 2013
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(UPDATED 2013 STRATEGY LUNCHEON SCHEDULE),
(THE PROBLEM WITH GM), (GM)
(WHY I LOVE/HATE THE OIL COMPANIES), (XOM), (USO),
(THE WORST TRADE IN HISTORY), (AAPL)
General Motors Company (GM)
Exxon Mobil Corporation (XOM)
United States Oil (USO)
Apple Inc. (AAPL)
Come join me for lunch for the Mad Hedge Fund Trader?s Global Strategy Updates, which I will be conducting throughout Europe during the summer of 2013. A three-course lunch will be followed by a PowerPoint presentation 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 keep you in suspense, I?ll be throwing a few surprises out there too. Enough charts, tables, graphs, and statistics will be thrown at you to keep your ears ringing for a week.
I look forward to meeting you, and thank you for supporting my research. To purchase tickets for the luncheons, please go to my online store at http://madhedgefundradio.com/ and click on ?LUNCHEONS?.
New York City - July 2
London, England - July 8
Amsterdam, Netherlands - July 12
Berlin, Germany - July 16
Frankfurt, Germany - July 19
Portofino, Italy - July 25
Mykonos, Greece - August 1
Zermatt, Switzerland - August 9
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