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.
The original purpose of this letter was to build a database 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 entire fundamental argument in favor of that position pops up.
You can do the same. Just type anything into the search box with the little magnifying glass in the upper right hand side of the Home Page, and a cornucopia of data, charts, and opinion will appear. Even the prices of camels in India (to find out why they?re going up, click here).
The data base goes back to February, 2008, totaling 2 million words, or four times the length of Tolstoy?s War and Peace. Watching the traffic over time, I can tell you how the data base is being used:
1) Small hedge funds want to see what the large hedge funds are doing.
2) Large hedge funds look to see what they have missed, which is usually nothing.
3) Midwestern advisors to find out what is happening in New York and Chicago.
4) American investors to find out if there are any opportunities overseas (there always are).
5) Foreign investors to find out what the hell is happening in the US (about 1,000 inquiries a day come in through Google?s translation software).
6) Specialist traders in stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities, and precious metals looking for cross market insights which will give them a trading advantage with their own book.
7) High net worth individuals managing their own portfolios so they don?t get screwed on management fees.
8) Low net worth individuals, students, and the military looking to expand their knowledge of financial markets (lots of free online time in the Navy).
9) People at the Treasury and the Fed trying to find out what the private sector is doing.
10) Staff at the SEC and the CFTC to see if there is anything new they should be regulating.
11) More staff at the Congress and the Senate looking for new hot button issues to distort and obfuscate.
12) Yet, even more staff in Obama?s office gauging his popularity and the reception of his policies.
13) As far as I know, no justices at the Supreme Court read my letter. They?re all closet indexers.
14) Potential investors/subscribers attempting to ascertain if I have the slightest idea of what I am talking about.
15) Me trying to remember trades which I recommended long ago, but have forgotten.
16) Me looking for trades that worked so I can say ?I told you so.?
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Woman-hitting-head.jpg213185Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2013-07-10 01:04:362013-07-10 01:04:36Please Use My Free Data Base Search
President Barack Obama certainly arrives at a party like a rock star. Three silver GM Suburban?s flanking an armored black Cadillac limo screech to a halt with lights flashing. All of the roads in the immediate vicinity are closed to traffic.
A dozen sunglass bedecked Secret Service agents leap out, immediately scanning the perimeter. The president bounds out and briskly walks to the plush home of a wealthy supporter.
I managed to briefly touch base with the president during his recent fund raising swing through the San Francisco Bay area. For a mere $32,000 donation to the Democratic National Committee, I received a sweaty handshake and a thank you from the former South Chicago community organizer.
It was all part of a broad swing through the Western states to rally the faithful, and to top off the DNC's coffers, which has raised a record $50 million in California this year. Perhaps Obama just wants to be among friends. While his national job approval rating languishes at 47%, it is 55% here, and an eye popping 72% among Democrats.
Since the 2008 election, some 6 million millennials, generation Y's, or echo boomers have gained the right to vote. Have you spoken to your kids lately? The only issues they care about, the environment, global warming, gay rights, and ending the war, are overwhelmingly Democratic ones. Another 4 million immigrants have also joined the voter rolls.
Sure, only 30% of these groups vote at all. But when election results swing on majorities that can be counted in the hundreds, think Florida in 2000, Ohio in 2004, and Minnesota in 2008, they could make a decisive difference.
The polls we see reported daily are only taken of participants with land lines. So they may be undercounting both cell phone addicted, texting millennials, and immigrants. How many of your kids have land lines? My bet would be none.
Now, let me throw one big unknown out there. Thanks to the Supreme Court's Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission decision, the most recent election was the first to see unlimited anonymous corporate donations since the sixties. As a result, the number of election ads disclosing donors has fallen from 97% in 2006 to 32%.
California's proposition 23 was a perfect example of what this means. Billed as the 'Save California jobs bill,' the measure was placed on the ballot and promoted by $6 million in financing from Texas base energy giant Tesoro Petroleum (TSO). And what is the company's plan to create California jobs? Suspend the state's stringent environmental regulations so it could build a new oil refinery in nearby Martinez.
In every postwar election, the party in power has lost an average 27 House seats in the midterm elections. Obama knew this the day he walked into office. That is why the most radical parts of his agenda, like health care, were front end loaded. Expect to hear much about the President's surprise, Clintonesque move to the middle, which was in fact, planned two years ago.
Yes, I know, I should stick to my day job of calling every turn in the market. But sometimes, that profession and making political prognostications become one in the same. Knowing who the next president is going to be is an immensely valuable piece of market information, as the economic philosophies of the two parties are so radically different.
Do you think the White House situation room has a ladies room?
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Obama-with-Security.jpg328398Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2013-07-10 01:03:352013-07-10 01:03:35Drinks With the President
While the Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader focuses on investment over a one week to six-month time frame, Mad Day Trader, provided by Jim Parker, will exploit money-making opportunities over a brief ten minute to three day window. It is ideally suited for day traders, but can also be used by long-term investors to improve market timing for entry and exit points.Read more
While the Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader focuses on investment over a one week to six-month time frame, Mad Day Trader, provided by Jim Parker, will exploit money-making opportunities over a brief ten minute to three day window. It is ideally suited for day traders, but can also be used by long-term investors to improve market timing for entry and exit points.Read more
While the Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader focuses on investment over a one week to six-month time frame, Mad Day Trader, provided by Jim Parker, will exploit money-making opportunities over a brief ten minute to three day window. It is ideally suited for day traders, but can also be used by long-term investors to improve market timing for entry and exit points.Read more
Featured Trade: (JULY 16 BERLIN STRATEGY LUNCHEON), (WHO IS BEN BERNANKE?), (KEEP INDONESIA ON YOUR RADAR), (IDX), (WHY WE NEED SIX NEW SAUDI ARABIA?S) (USO), (RIG), (XOM), (OXY)
Market Vectors Indonesia Index ETF (IDX)
United States Oil (USO)
Transocean Ltd. (RIG)
Exxon Mobil Corporation (XOM)
Occidental Petroleum Corporation (OXY)
Come join John Thomas for lunch at the Mad Hedge Fund Trader?s Global Strategy Update, which I will be conducting in Berlin, Germany, at 12:00 noon on Tuesday, July 16, 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 $219.
The lunch will be held at a downtown Berlin hotel within sight of the Brandenburg Gate, the details of which 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.
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Berlin-Brandenburg-Gate.jpg268356Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2013-07-09 01:06:562013-07-09 01:06:56July 16 Berlin Strategy Luncheon
Since nothing less than the fate of the free world depends on the judgment of Ben Bernanke these days, I thought I?d touch base with David Wessel, the Wall Street Journal economics editor, who has just published In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke?s War on the Great Panic.
I doubted David could tell me anything more about the former Princeton professor I didn?t already know. I couldn?t have been more wrong, as David gave me some fascinating insights into the inner soul of our much-vaunted Chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Bernanke was the smartest kid in rural Dillon, South Carolina, who, through a series of improbable accidents, and intervention by a local black civil rights leader, ended up at Harvard. He built his career on studying the Great Depression, then the closest thing to paleontology economics had to offer, a field focused so distantly on the past that it was irrelevant. Bernanke took over the Fed when Greenspan was considered a rock star, inhaling his libertarian, free-market, Ayn Rand inspired philosophy in great giant gulps.
Within a year the economy had suddenly transported itself back to the Jurassic Age, and the landscape was suddenly overrun with T-Rex?s and Brontosauri. He tried to stop the panic 150 different ways, 125 of which were terrible ideas, the remaining 25 saving us from the Great Depression II. This is why unemployment is now only 7.6%, instead of 25%.
The Fed governor is naturally a very shy and withdrawing person, and would have been quite happy limiting his political career to the Princeton, NJ school board. To rebuild confidence, he took his campaign to the masses, attending town hall meetings and pressing the flesh like a campaigning first term congressman.
The price tag for Ben?s success has been large, with the Fed balance sheet exploding from $800 million to $3.6 trillion, solely on his signature. The true cost of the financial crisis won?t be known for a decade or more. The biggest risk is that we grow complacent, having pulled back from the brink, and let desperately needed reforms of the financial system and the rebuilding of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac slide.
How Bernanke unwinds this bubble will define his legacy. Too soon, and we go back into a real depression. Too late, and hyperinflation hits. That?s when we find out who Ben Bernanke really is.
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/220px-Ben_Bernanke_official_portrait.jpg275220Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2013-07-09 01:05:482013-07-09 01:05:48Who is Ben Bernanke?
If you are looking for another emerging market to add to your list of things to buy on dips, then take a look at Indonesia (IDX). The world?s largest Muslim country offers a combination that I love, a population with great demographics that is also a major energy and commodities exporter.
The archipelago is the biggest country in Southeast Asia and a huge exporter of oil and LPG to Japan on long-term contracts. (An old friend of mine torched their Borneo fields at the beginning of WWII, and spent four years in a Japanese prison camp for his troubles.) Other big exports include marvelous textiles, rubber, and increasingly rare tropical hardwoods. Another plus is one of the world?s most pro growth population pyramids (see below).
The global financial crisis only knocked their growth rate from 6.1% to 4.5%, and now it is back above 6%. No doubt, $63 billion of direct foreign investment into the country helped. A series of tax reforms promise to keep the train moving, cutting the top corporate rate from 30% in 2008 to 28% in 2009, and 25% in 2010. Wisdom Tree had the ?wisdom? to launch the country?s first ETF (IDX) in January, 2009 (what timing!), which became one of the best performers of the year, rocketing over 300% from the lows to $60.
Islamic inspired terrorism is still a lingering concern. I keep Indonesia in the category of highly volatile, high risk, high return frontier markets that you only want to buy on a big dip. Keep it on your radar.
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Indonesian-Natives.jpg322474Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2013-07-09 01:04:472013-07-09 01:04:47Keep Indonesia on your Radar
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