Featured Trades: (RESIDENTIAL REAL ESTATE) 1) Years of Pain to Come in Residential Real Estate. Regular readers of this letter are familiar with my antipathy towards real estate of every flavor, with the exceptions of multi-unit dwellings (apartment buildings) and farmland . So my interest was piqued when Ron Peltier spoke the other day, the
Featured Trades: (HEDGE FUNDS) 2) Who Says Hedge Funds Aren't Adding Value? According to my old friend, Rick Sopher, chairman of LCH Investments in London, the top ten hedge funds have earned $153 billion for their investors since inception. John Paulson's fund alone, which made an absolute killing by shorting subprime mortgage debt instruments going
'I'm sure there are gobs and gobs of money to be made in emerging markets,' said legendary hedge fund manager Bill Fleckenstein on Hedge Fund Radio.
Featured Trades: (SOLAR ENERGY PARITY), (FSLR) 3) Solar Energy is Poised to Achieve Cost Parity. After two years of relentless cost, the solar industry is about to reach the Holy Grail of parity with the cost of conventional power sources at around 10 cents per kilowatt hour, paving the way for and exponential growth in
Featured Trades: (THE YEAR OF THE RABBIT), (FXI), (SSEC), (CYB) 1) Ringing in the Year of the Rabbit. An invitation to the Chinese consulate for their New Year's party is always one of the most sought after invitations in the Lilliputan diplomatic community of San Francisco. Welcoming the Year of the Rabbit were true Mandarins
Featured Trades: (WALL STREET) 3) An Insider's Review of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. One of the great things about flying first class is that you often get to meet some pretty interesting people. During the early eighties, I found myself on a flight from Los Angles to New York sitting next to an unknown
Featured Trades: (MORE ON EGYPT) 3) More Insights on Egypt. I had dinner with Neil MacFarquhar, UN Bureau Chief and former Cairo Bureau Chief for the New York Times, to get the latest view of what is happening on the Arab 'street.' MacFarquhar grew up in Libya around the time I tried to visit the
(SPECIAL MIDDLE EAST ISSUE) Featured Trades: (THOUGHTS ON EGYPT) 1) Thoughts on Egypt. When I first visited Egypt in 1977, they tried to kill me. I was accompanying US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on an Air Force jet as part of his shuttle diplomacy between Tel Aviv and Cairo. Every Arab terrorist organization
Featured Trades: (THE VIX SPIKE), (VXX), (Q4 GDP) 1) Learning About VIX the Hard Way. We certainly received a highly instructive lesson on how the volatility index (VIX) works on Friday. All it took was a ten point drop in the S&P 500 to trigger a stampede to buy insurance against further declines, taking
Featured Trades: (GOLD), (GLD), (DGZ), (GLL) 2) So Close, Yet So Far on Gold. Close, but no cigar on getting out of my gold puts on Friday. We opened low enough on Friday morning to get within striking distance of my downside target for the barbarous relic at $1,280. But once the rout in equities
