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
Global Market Comments
January 29, 2015
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(QUALCOMM GUIDANCE CRUSHES STOCK), (QCOM)
(BUSINESS IS BOOMING AT THE MONEY PRINTERS),
(TESTIMONIAL)
QUALCOMM Incorporated (QCOM)
It seems that the harder I work, the luckier I get.
Last week I made a bet that companies with a high share of international business would be punished severely during earnings season.
Specifically, I picked QUALCOMM (QCOM), the San Diego based maker of processors for cell phones, tablets, and laptops, because it had the highest percentage of foreign earnings among the S&P 500.
Three days later, after years of dawdling, the European Central Bank announced a particularly aggressive form of quantitative easing that sent the Euro crashing. You might as well have sent a torpedo directly into QUALCOMM?s bottom line.
The company?s Q4 earnings report, announced after the Tuesday close, confirmed my worst fears. While the earnings held up surprisingly well, the second half guidance was downright apocalyptic.
The stock immediately gapped down to $65 in the aftermarket, off some 8%, in a heartbeat.
Foreign earnings are a great place to hide when the greenback is soggy. It is a terrible place to be when the buck is moving from strength to strength, as it has for the past eight months.
It turns out that there is much more that is wrong under the hood at QUALCOMM than the recent collapse of the Euro and the Yen.
Much of the meteoric growth of Apple?s (AAPL) iPhone 6 sales in recent months has been at the expense of Samsung and other competitors. I hate to say ?I told you so? but I have been predicting this all along.
While QUALCOMM sells to both companies, particularly its Snapdragon 800 quadcore processor, it gets a lesser share of the profits on its sales to Apple. QUALCOMM is therefore, effectively, an indirect short position in Apple.
Oops!
I think you can take QUALCOMM?s woeful stock performance today as a warning that there is more suffering to come on the foreign earnings front by other companies yet to report.
For more depth on this, please read yesterday?s piece on ?The Unintended Consequences of the Euro Crash? by clicking here.
As for the happy holders of my recommended QUALCOMM (QCOM) February, 2015 $75-$80 in-the-money bear put spread, good for you! You have just made a nearly instant 2.25% profit on your total portfolio in a mere seven trading days. That works out to a gain of 22% on this single position.
There is no point in running this position the remaining three weeks into the February 20 expiration, as you have already reaped 95% of the potential profit. Better to free up the cash to roll into a new position, while simultaneously reducing your risk.
Or, you could simply take a long vacation from the miserable, unforgiving market.
There Goes QUALCOMM?s Earnings
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
Global Market Comments
January 28, 2015
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF THE EURO CRASH),
(FXE), (EUO)
(CAT), (PG), (MSFT), (M), (FDO), (COST), (TGT), (WMT)
(RSP), (QQQ), (IWM)
(WATCH OUT FOR THE HEAD AND SHOULDERS)
(SPY), (QQQ), (TLT), (FXE), (FXY), (GLD), (SLV)
CurrencyShares Euro ETF (FXE)
ProShares UltraShort Euro (EUO)
Caterpillar Inc. (CAT)
The Procter & Gamble Company (PG)
Microsoft Corporation (MSFT)
Macy's, Inc. (M)
Family Dollar Stores Inc. (FDO)
Costco Wholesale Corporation (COST)
Target Corp. (TGT)
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT)
Guggenheim S&P 500 Equal Weight ETF (RSP)
PowerShares QQQ Trust, Series 1 (QQQ)
iShares Russell 2000 (IWM)
SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY)
iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond (TLT)
CurrencyShares Japanese Yen ETF (FXY)
SPDR Gold Shares (GLD)
iShares Silver Trust (SLV)
For those of you who heeded my expert advice to buy the ProShares Ultra Short Euro ETF (EUO) last July, well done!
You are up a massive 48%! This is on a move in the underlying European currency of only 18.5%.
My browsing of the Galleria in Milan, the strolls through Spanish shopping malls, and my dickering with an assortment of dubious Greek merchants, all paid off big time. It turns out that everything I predicted for this beleaguered currency came true.
The European economy did collapse. Cantankerous governments made the problem worse by squabbling, delaying and obfuscating, as usual.
The European Central Bank finally threw in the towel and did everything they could to collapse the value of the Euro and reinvigorate their comatose economies. This they did by imitating America?s wildly successful quantitative easing, which they announced with local variations last Thursday.
And now for the good news: The best is yet to come!
Europe is now six days into a strategy of aggressive monetary easing which may take as long as five years until it delivers tangible, sustainable results. That?s how long it took for the Federal Reserve?s QE to restore satisfactory levels of confidence in the US economy.
The net net is that we have almost certainly only seen the first act of a weakening of the Euro which may last for years. A short Euro could be the trade that keeps on giving.
The ECB?s own target now is obviously parity against the greenback, which you will find predicted in my own 2015 Annual Asset Class Review released at the beginning of January (click here).
Once they hit that target, 87 cents to the Euro will become the new goal, and that could be achieved sooner than later.
However, you will not find me short the Euro up the wazoo this minute. I think we have just stumbled into a classic ?Buy the Rumor, Sell the News? situation with the Euro.
The next act will involve the ECB sitting on its hands for a year, realizing that their first pass at QE was inadequate, superficial, and flaccid, and that it is time to pull the bazooka out of their pockets once again.
This is a problem when the entire investment world is short the Euro. That paves the way for countless, rip your face off short covering rallies in the months ahead. Any smidgeon or blip of positive European economic data could spark one of these.
Trading the Euro for the past eight months has been like falling off a log. It is about to get dull, mean and brutish. So for the moment, my currency play has morphed into selling short the Japanese yen, which has its own unique set of problems.
As for the unintended consequences of the Euro crash, the Q4 earnings reports announced so far by corporate America tells the whole story.
Companies with a heavy dependence on foreign (read Euro and yen) denominated earnings are almost universally coming up short. On this list you can include Caterpillar (CAT), Procter and Gamble (PG), and Microsoft (MSFT).
Who are the winners in the strong dollar, weak Euro contest? US companies that see a high proportion of their costs denominated in flagging foreign currencies, but see their incomes arrive totally in the form of robust, virile dollars.
You may not realize it, but you are playing the global currency arbitrage game every time you go shopping. The standout names here are US retailers, which manufacture abroad virtually all of the junk they sell you here, especially in low waged China.
The stars here are Macy?s (M), Family Dollar Stores (FDO), Costco (COST), Target (TGT), and Wal-Mart (WMT).
You can see this divergence crystal clear in examining the behavior of the major stock indexes. The chart for the Guggenheim S&P 500 Equal Weight ETF (RSP), which has the greatest share of currency sensitive multinationals, looks positively dire, and may be about to put in a fatal ?Head and Shoulders? top (see the following story).
The chart for the NASDAQ (QQQ), where constituent companies have less, but still a substantial foreign currency exposure, appears to be putting in a sideways pennant formation before eventually breaking out to new highs once again.
The small cap Russell 2000, which is composed of almost entirely domestic, dollar based, ?Made in America? type companies, is by far the strongest index of the trio, and looks like it is just biding time before it blasts through to new highs.
If you are a follower of my Trade Alert Service, then you already know that I have a long position in the (IWM), which has already chipped in 2.12% to my 2015 performance.
You see, there is a method to my Madness.
Never Underestimate the Value of Research
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
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
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