While the Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader focuses on investment over a one week to a six-month time frame, Mad Day Trader, provided by Bill Davis, 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
August 8, 2019
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(HOW TO KNOW IF THE BULL MARKET IS WELL AND TRULY OVER),
(THE TALE OF TWO ECONOMIES),
(FB), (AAPL), (AMZN)
I have lately been besieged with emails from followers asking if they should sell everything, put all their money into cash, and if the great bull market is well and truly over.
My answer is the same to all. If a full-throated and affirmative “NOT YET”. Things may look scary now, but they could get a lot worse, and eventually, that will take place.
I’ll tell you why. I have a laundry list of issues that could kill the bull once and for all. And while some of them are flashing alarm signals, many aren’t. I’ll go through them one by one.
Inequality
The Trade War – is far and away the biggest risk to the market. If each escalation is met with Chinese retaliation, then both countries will slide into recession. At some point, cooler heads may prevail but that is no sure thing. Having met several men who endured the 1936-38 Long March, I can assure you that the Chinese have a far better ability to sustain pain than we do. And the Chinese don’t have an election next year.
Cyber Terrorism – Imagine that you sat down to turn on your computer one day and nothing happened. The Internet was down, all financial transactions ceased, the power went out, and all food distribution ceased. America’s Internet infrastructure is far more vulnerable than most people realize. That's why I have been recommending cybersecurity stocks for the past decade. Certainly, my own local utility, PG&E (PGE) doesn’t maintain security to a military standard. It should.
Debt Levels in China – It’s easy to forget that perhaps 40% of China’s government-owned financial institutions are de facto bankrupt. They have been accumulating bad loans for decades and hiding them on their balance sheets and essential negative net worths. If one suddenly goes under, it could easily lead to a cascading series of bankruptcies much as we saw in the US during the 2008 financial crisis that spills over to the US and Europe. Back then, we lost Lehman Brothers and Bear Steans, and could have lost everyone if the government hadn’t stepped in.
Debt levels in the US – Passage of the latest spending bill means the US national debt is about to soar from $22 to $24 trillion over the next two years. The markets are ignoring this for now. It won’t forever.
Movement to the Left – Trump has run the most radically right-wing government in American history. Can you believe that we are now in the concentration camp business? The risk is that the electorate responds by installing a radical left-wing government in 2020 in reaction. That would bring a return of 90% personal tax rates, the elimination of long term capital gains treatments, and other policies with a strong anti-business tilt.
Global Interest Rates at Zero – We seem to be well on our way there. Once at zero, central banks will be powerless to get us out of recessions by cutting rates. Just look at how Japan has done over the past 30 years.
2020 Election – Is going to be loaded with fireworks to be sure. The rancor may get so extreme on both sides that it literally scares people out the market.
Middle East War – War with Iran, which is now threatened daily by the administration, will be an enormous drag of the US economy. Investment shifts from machinery to weapons, which have no impact on productivity.
Trump Blows Up – The president implements a policy that is so deleterious to the US economy that the stock market panics. Some would argue we are already there.
Climate Change Accelerates – That is already happening but is hurting countries closer to the equator than ourselves, like India and Egypt. The US military certainly considers this an existential threat. Increased severe hurricanes, heat caused crop failures, wildfires, and more frequent flooding are already having severe localized effects. Imagine all that getting much worse. And there are severe impacts which we haven’t even thought about yet. The first effect we have already seen? Higher insurance premiums for everyone. Good luck getting new fire insurance in California or flood insurance in Florida.
She Doesn’t Live Forever
I’m looking at my screens this morning and virtually every stock sold short by the Dairy of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader cratered to new six-month lows.
Call it lucky, call it fortuitous. All I know is that the harder I work the luckier I get.
If you are in the right economy, that of the future, you are having another spectacular year. If you aren’t, you are probably posting horrific losses for 2019. Call it the “Tale of two Economies.”
I suspected that this was setting up over the last couple of weeks. No matter how much bad news and uncertainty dumped on these companies, the shares absolutely refused to go down. Instead, they flat lined just below their 2019 highs. It was a market begging for a selloff.
When the Facebook (FB) hacking scandal hit, investors were ringing their hands about the potential demise of Mark Zuckerberg’s vaunted business model and the shares plunged to $123.
However, while analysts were making these dire productions, I knew that Facebook itself was signing a long-term lease for a brand new 46-story skyscraper in downtown San Francisco just to house its Instagram operations.
Months later, and the company that misused Facebook’s data, Steve Bannon’s Cambridge Analytica, is bankrupt, and (FB) is trading at $185, a new high. Facebook was right, and the Cassandras were wrong.
Amazon was given up for dead during the February melt down as the shares withered from a daily onslaught of presidential attacks threatening antitrust action. Today, the shares are up a mind-blowing 38% above those lows.
And when Apple announced its earnings, the shares tickled $222, putting it squarely back into the ranks of the $1 trillion club ($949 billion at today’s close).
It turns out that technology companies are immune from most of the negative developments that have caused the rest of the stock market to drag. I’ll go through these one at a time.
Falling Interest Rates
Tech companies are sitting gigantic cash mountains, some $245 billion in Apple’s case, which means that as net lenders to the credit markets, they are beneficiaries of the credit markets. This makes tech companies immune from the credit problems that will demolish old economy industries during the next rate spike.
Rising Oil Prices
While tech companies are prodigious consumers of electricity, many power these with massive solar arrays and they sell periodic excess power to local utilities. So as net energy producers, they profit from rising energy prices.
Rising Inflation
Since the output of technology companies is entirely digital, they can handily increase productivity faster than the inflation rate, whatever it is. Traditional old economy companies, like industrials and retailers can’t do this.
Remember that while analogue production grows linearly, digital production grows exponentially, enabling tech companies to handily beat the inflation demon, leaving others behind in the dust.
Share Buybacks
While technology companies account for only 26% of the S&P 500 stock market capitalization, they generate 50% of the profits. Thanks to the massive tax breaks and low tax repatriation of foreign profits enabled by the 2017 tax bill, share buybacks are expected to rocket from $500 billion to $1 trillion this year. Companies repurchasing their own shares have become the sole net buyers of equities in 2019.
And companies with the biggest profits buy back the most stock. This has created a virtuous cycle whereby higher share prices generate more buybacks to create yet higher share prices. Old economy companies with lesser profits are buying back little, if any, of their own shares.
Of course, tech companies are not without their own challenges. For a start, they have each other to worry about. FANGs will simultaneously cooperate with each other in a dozen areas, while fight tooth and nail and sue on a dozen others. It’s like watching Silicon Valley’s own version of HBO’s Game of Thrones.
Also, occasionally, the tech story becomes so obvious to the unwashed masses that it creates severe overbought conditions and temporary peaks, like we saw in January.
“The rule book on how things are done and how they will play out you can just throw away right now,” said Scott Minerd of Guggenheim Partners.
7When John identifies a strategic exit point, he will send you an alert with specific trade information as to what security to sell, when to sell it, and at what price. Most often, it will be to TAKE PROFITS, but, on rare occasions, it will be to exercise a STOP LOSS at a predetermined price to adhere to strict risk management discipline. Read more
When John identifies a strategic exit point, he will send you an alert with specific trade information as to what security to sell, when to sell it, and at what price. Most often, it will be to TAKE PROFITS, but, on rare occasions, it will be to exercise a STOP LOSS at a predetermined price to adhere to strict risk management discipline. Read more
When John identifies a strategic exit point, he will send you an alert with specific trade information as to what security to sell, when to sell it, and at what price. Most often, it will be to TAKE PROFITS, but, on rare occasions, it will be to exercise a STOP LOSS at a predetermined price to adhere to strict risk management discipline. Read more
When John identifies a strategic exit point, he will send you an alert with specific trade information as to what security to sell, when to sell it, and at what price. Most often, it will be to TAKE PROFITS, but, on rare occasions, it will be to exercise a STOP LOSS at a predetermined price to adhere to strict risk management discipline. Read more
When John identifies a strategic exit point, he will send you an alert with specific trade information as to what security to sell, when to sell it, and at what price. Most often, it will be to TAKE PROFITS, but, on rare occasions, it will be to exercise a STOP LOSS at a predetermined price to adhere to strict risk management discipline. Read more
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