Global Market Comments
December 18, 2018
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:(THE CHRISTMAS RALLY GOT STOPPED AT THE BORDER)
(TLT), (TSLA), (AAPL)
(THE PASSIVE/AGGRESSIVE PORTFOLIO),
(ROM), (UYG), (UCC), (DIG), (BIB), (UGL), (UCD), (TBT)
On Sunday, I spent 30 minutes driving around looking for a parking space at Target. Once there, I waited for another half hour while the people in front of me paid for their entire Christmas shopping for the year. You can’t get a restaurant reservation anywhere.
With economic conditions this strong, you would think the stock market would be booming, soaring to new highs daily.
It’s not. In fact, as I write this, the Dow Average is now down 5% in 2018 and off a gut-punching 13% since the beginning of October. Two-month support was shattered yesterday.
In fact, stocks have just suffered their worst quarter in a decade. Technology shares, in particular, have taken the biggest hit since the 2000 Dotcom Bust. We have in effect seen Dotcom Bust 2.0.
I warned readers for years that the top of this bull market may not be defined by any particular economic or geopolitical event. The sheer weight of prices could do it. Some 2 ½ months into a horrific meltdown and it looks like that is what happened. I’ve lost count of the 600 points downdrafts in recent weeks.
All of which I find extremely annoying as I missed one of the greatest short selling opportunities of all time. I feel like such an idiot. I did get off a few shorts. My Tesla short (TSLA) is going gangbusters but I still love the company long term. The bond market (TLT) remains my new rich uncle, writing me generous checks monthly.
The reason I didn’t go short more aggressively is that the risk of a China trade deal was always looming on the horizon. When it happens, markets could rocket 10%. But nine months into the trade war, and it still remains way out there on the horizon. Wasn’t it General Douglas MacArthur who said the US should never get involved in a land war in Asia?
Of course, the reasons are all crystal clear with 20/20 hindsight. The Federal Reserve giveth, and Federal Reserve taketh away. While global liquidity was exploding, stocks could only go one way, and that was up. Fortunately, I was one of the early ones to figure this out. But then, I took former Governor Janet Yellen’s class at UC Berkley.
Now, everywhere you look liquidity is disappearing. The US government will run a $1 trillion budget deficit in 2019. Add in entitlements and that balloons to $1.3 trillion.
The Fed is sucking out another $600 billion next year as part of its quantitative tightening, the long-advertised QE unwind. Did I mention that the Fed has raised interest rates six times in three years and will raise again once more on Wednesday?
As I peruse my charts and run the numbers on possible options combinations, the number of “screaming buys” almost can’t be counted. Apple (AAPL), for example is looking at a potential $10 of downside versus $170 of upside on a five-year view.
But you know, sitting on your hands seems to be working for everyone else. I think I’ll give it a try. It is far easier to buy them on the way up than catch a falling knife. Sure, I’m unchanged on the quarter, but unchanged is not what I’m all about. I think I’ll just lock in my 30% return this year and call it a year. I’ll be a hero again in 2019.
I Think I’ll Just Sit Tight For Now
What if you want to be a little more aggressive, say twice as aggressive?
What if markets don’t deliver any year on year change as they have done many times in the past?
Then you need a little more juice in your portfolio, and some extra leverage to earn your crust of bread and secure your retirement.
It turns out that I have just the solution for you.
This would be my “Passive/Aggressive Portfolio.”
I call it passive in that you just purchase these positions and leave them alone and not trade them.
I call it aggressive as it involves a basket of 2x leveraged ETFs issued by ProShares, based in Bethesda, MD (click here for their link).
The volatility of this portfolio will be higher. But the returns will be double what you would get with an index fund, and possibly much more. It is a “Do not open until 2035” kind of investment strategy.
Here is the makeup of the portfolio:
(ROM) –- ProShares Ultra Technology Fund - The three largest single-stock holdings are Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), and Facebook (FB). For more details on the fund, please click here.
(UYG) – ProShares Ultra Financials Fund - The three largest single-stock holdings are Wells Fargo (WFC), Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B), and JP Morgan Chase (JPM). For more details on the fund, please click here.
(UCC) – ProShares Ultra Consumer Services Fund - The three largest single-stock holdings are Amazon (AMZN), (Walt Disney), (DIS), and Home Depot (HD). For more details on the fund, please click here.
(DIG) -- ProShares Ultra Oil & Gas Fund - The three largest single-stock holdings are ExxonMobile (XOM), Chevron (CVX), and Schlumberger (SLB). For more details on the fund, please click here.
(BIB) – ProShares Ultra NASDAQ Biotechnology Fund – The three largest single-stock holdings are Amgen (AMGN), Regeneron (REGN), and Gilead Sciences (GILD). For more details on the fund, please click here.
You can play around with the sector mix at your own discretion. Just focus on the fastest growing sectors of the US economy which the Mad Hedge Fund Trader does on a daily basis.
It is tempting to add more leveraged ETFs for sectors that are completely bombed out, like gold (UGL) and commodities (UCD).
But it is likely that these despised ETF’s will move down before they move up, especially going into yearend.
There is also the 2X short Treasury bond fund (TBT) which I have been trading in and out of for years, a bet that long-term bonds will go down, interest rates rise.
There are a couple of provisos to mention here.
This is absolutely NOT a portfolio you want to own going into a recession. So you will need to exercise some kind of market timing, however occasional.
The good news is that I make more money in bear markets than I do in bull markets because the volatility is so high. However, to benefit from this skill set, you have to keep reading the Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader.
There is also a problem with leveraged ETFs in that management and other fees can be high, dealing spreads wide, and tracking error huge.
This is why I am limiting the portfolio to 2X ETFs, and avoiding their much more costly and inefficient 3X cousins which are really only good for intraday trading. The 3X ETFs are really just a broker enrichment vehicle.
There are also going to be certain days when you might want to just go out and watch a long movie, like Gone With the Wind, with an all ETF portfolio, rather than monitor their performance, no matter how temporary it may be.
A good example was the August 24 flash crash when the complete absence of liquidity drove all of these funds to huge discounts to their asset values.
Check out the charts below, and you can see the damage that was wrought by high-frequency traders on that cataclysmic day, down -35% in the case of the (ROM). Notice that all of these discounts disappeared within hours. It was really just a function of the pricing mechanism being broken.
I have found the portfolio above quite useful when close friends and family members ask me for stock tips for their retirement funds.
It was perfect for my daughter who won’t be tapping her teacher’s pension accounts for another 45 years when I will be long gone. She mentions her blockbuster returns every time I see her, and she has only been in them for five years.
Imagine what technology, financial services, consumer discretionaries, biotechnology, and oil and gas will be worth then? It boggles the mind. My guess is up 100-fold from today’s levels.
You won’t want to put all of your money into a single portfolio like this. But it might be worth carving out 10% of your capital and just leaving it there.
That will certainly be a recommendation for financial advisors besieged with clients complaining about paying high fees for negative returns in a year that is unchanged, or up only 1%-2%. Virtually everyone has them right now.
Adding some spice, and a little leverage to their portfolios might be just the ticket for them.
Good to Have a Portfolio for All Market Conditions
“Excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake. To be precise it was my mistake. Humans are underrated.” - Said Elon Musk, CEO at Tesla
Global Market Comments
December 17, 2018
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(THE MARKET OUTLOOK FOR THE WEEK AHEAD, or THERE’S NO SANTA CLAUS IN CHINA)
($INDU), (SPY), (TLT), (AAPL), (AMZN), (NVDA), (PYPL), (NFLX)
On Friday, five serious hedge fund managers separately called me out of the blue and all had the same thing to say. They had never seen the market so negative before in the wake of the worst quarter in seven years. Therefore, it had to be a “BUY”.
I, on the other hand, am a little more cautious. I have four 10% positions left that expire on Friday, in four trading days, and on that day I am going 100% into cash. At that point, I will be up 3.5% for the month of December, up 31.34% on the year, and will have generated positive return for one of the worst quarters in market history.
I’m therefore going to call it a win and head for the High Sierras for a well-earned Christmas vacation. After that, I am going to wait for the market to tell me what to do. If it collapses, I’ll buy it. If it rockets, I’ll sell short. And I’ll tell you why.
These are not the trading conditions you would expect when the economy is humming along at a 2.8% annual rate, unemployment is running at a half-century low, and earnings are growing a 26% year on year. You can’t find a parking spot in a shopping mall anywhere.
However, the lead stocks like Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN), and Netflix (NFLX) have plunged by 30%-60%. Price earnings multiples dropped by a stunning 27.5% from 20X to 14.5X in a mere ten weeks. Half of the S&P 500 (SPY) is in a bear market, although the index itself isn’t there yet. I would rather be buying markets on their way up than to try and catch a falling knife.
There is only one catalyst for that apparent yawning contradiction: The President of the United States.
Trump has created a global trade war solely on his own authority. Only he can end it. As a result, asset classes of every description are beset with uncertainty, confusion, and doubt about the future. Analysts are shaving 2019 growth forecasts as fast as they can, businesses are postponing capital spending plans, and investors are running for the sidelines in droves. Business confidence is falling like a rock
To paraphrase a saying they used to teach you in Marine Corps flight school, “It’s better to be in cash wishing you were fully invested than to be fully invested wishing you were in cash.”
The Chinese have absolutely no interest in caving into Trump’s wishes. They read the New York Times, see the midterm election result and the opinion polls, and are willing to bet that they can get a much better deal from a future president in two years.
I have been dealing personally with both Trump and the Chinese government for four decades. The Middle Kingdom measures history in Millenia. The president lives from tweet to tweet. The Chinese government can take pain by simply ordering its people to take it. We have elections every two years with immediate consequences.
The best we can hope for is that the president folds, declares victory, and then retreats from his personal war. This can happen at any time, or it may not happen at all. No one has an advantage in predicting what will happen with any certainty. Not even the president knows what he is going to do from minute to minute.
It is the possibility of trade peace at any time that has kept me out of the short side of the stock market in this severe downturn. That robs a real hedge fund manager of half his potential income. Trade peace could be worth an instant rally of 10% in the stock market. Even a lesser move, like the firing of trade advisor Peter Navarro, would accomplish the same.
The market was long overdue for a correction like the one we have just had. Investors were getting overconfident, cocky, and excessively leveraged. In October, we really needed the tide to go out to see who was swimming without a swimsuit. But if the tide goes out too far, we will all appear naked.
Thanks to some very artful trading, my year to date return recovered to +27.54% boosting my trailing one-year return back up to 27.54%. I covered an aggressive short position in the bond market (TLT) for a welcome 14.4% profit. I also took profits with an instant winner in PayPal (PYPL). On the debit side, I stopped out of an Apple call spread for a minimal loss.
December is showing a very modest loss at -0.26%. The market has become virtually untradeable now, with tweets and China rumors roiling markets for 500 points at a pop. And this is against a Dow Average that is down a miserable -2.8% so far in 2018. I should have listened to my mother when she wanted me to become a doctor.
My nine-year return nudged up to +304.01. The average annualized return revived to +33.77.
The upcoming week is all about housing data, with the big focus on the Fed’s interest rate hike on Wednesday.
Monday, December 17 at 10:00 AM EST, the November Homebuilders Index is out.
On Tuesday, December 18 at 8:30 AM, November Housing Starts are published.
On Wednesday, December 19 at 10:00 AM EST, November Existing Home Sales are released.
At 10:30 AM EST the Energy Information Administration announces oil inventory figures with its Petroleum Status Report.
At 2:00 PM the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee announces a 25 basis point rise in interest rates, taking the overnight rate to 2.25% to 2.50%. An important press conference with governor Jay Powell follows.
Thursday, December 20 at 8:30 AM EST, we get Weekly Jobless Claims.
On Friday, December 21, at 8:30 AM EST, we learn the latest revision to Q3 GDP which now stands at 2.8%.
The Baker-Hughes Rig Count follows at 1:00 PM.
As for me, I’ll be battling snow storms driving up to Lake Tahoe where I’ll be camping out for the next two weeks. Mistletoe, eggnog, and endless games of Monopoly and Scrabble await me.
Good luck and good trading!
John Thomas
CEO & Publisher
The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader
Global Market Comments
December 14, 2018
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(DECEMBER 12 BIWEEKLY STRATEGY WEBINAR Q&A),
(SPX), (MU), (PYPL), (SPOT), (FXE), (FXY), (XLF), (MSFT), (AMZN), (TSLA), (XOM),
(SIGN UP NOW FOR TEXT MESSAGING OF TRADE ALERTS)
Below please find subscribers’ Q&A for the Mad Hedge Fund Trader December 12 Global Strategy Webinar with my guest and co-host Bill Davis of the Mad Day Trader
Q: Is the bottom in on the S&P 500 (SPX) or are we going to go on another retest?
A: It’s stuck right in the 2600-2800 range, and I think that’s probably where we bounce off of 2600 again. The question is whether or not we can clear the top of the range at 2800. If we can’t, I would fully expect a retest of this bottom in which case I could see it going down to 2500.
Q: You say you’ll go 100% cash by Dec 21st but also stated that the S&P 500 will go up 5% by the year's end. Should we stay in until we get the up 5% move?
A: Yes, all of our options positions expire by the 21st but if you’re just long in stocks, I would stay long, probably through the end of the year.
Q: Will the Chinese-U.S. dispute ruin the Tech industry?
A: No, I think the Trump Administration will have to do some kind of deal and call it a victory, otherwise the trade war will pull the U.S. into recession. If we go into the next presidential election with another recession—well, no one has ever survived that. Even with the China-U.S. dispute, the U.S. is still dominant in the Tech industry and will continue to do so for decades to come.
Q: China has managed to duplicate Micron Technology’s (MU) biggest selling chip, undercutting prices—thoughts?
A: True, Micron is the lowest value added of the major chip producers, therefore their stock has gotten hit the worst of any of the chip stocks down by about 46%, but I know Micron very well and they have a whole range of chips they’re currently upgrading, moving themselves up the value change to compete with this. So, that makes it a great company to own for the long term.
Q: I’m up 90% on my PayPal (PYPL) position—should I take a profit?
A: Yes! Absolutely! How many 90% profits have you had lately? You are hereby excused from this webinar to go execute this trade. And well-done Dr. Denis! And thank you for the offer of a free colonoscopy.
Q: What can you say about Spotify (SPOT)?
A: No, thank you—there’s lots of competition in the music streaming business. We are avoiding the entire space. The added value is not great, and many of these companies will have a short life. And with China’s Tencent growing like crazy, life for Spotify is about to become dull, mean, and brutish.
Q: What’s your view on currencies?
A: So you’re looking to make another fortune? Yes, I think the Euro (FXE) and the Yen (FXY) really are looking hard to rally, and the trigger could be dovish language in the next Fed meeting. Once the Fed slows its rate of interest rates rises, the currencies should take off like a scalded chimp.
Q: Will the banks (XLF) rally in the next 6 months for a better sell?
A: Many people are waiting for a rally in the banks so they can unload them and haven’t gotten it—they’re back to pre-election price levels. The issue here is structural, and you don’t get recoveries from major structural changes in an industry. It’s significant that this is the first bull market that had no net new employment in the banks whatsoever; the business is fading away. They are the new buggy whip makers. These gigantic national branch networks will all be gone in ten years because the banks can’t afford them.
Q: Would you enter the Microsoft (MSFT) trade today?
A: I actually think I would; Microsoft only pulled back 10% when everything else was dropping 30%, 40%, or 50%. That shows you how many people are trying to get into this name so if you could take a little short-term pain (like 5%), the stock outright is probably a screaming buy here. I think it’ll go to $200 one day, so here at $110-$111 it looks like a pretty good deal. The story here is that Microsoft is rapidly taking market share from Amazon (AMZN) in the cloud business and that’s going to continue.
Q: When will you be updating your long-term model portfolio?
A: I usually do it at the end of the year, and rarely make any big changes. I’ll still be selling short bonds and still like Tesla (TSLA) and Exxon (XOM).
Q: I just joined your service. What is the best way to get started?
A: I’ll give you the same advice that I gave every starting trader at Morgan Stanley (MS). Start trading on paper only. When you are making money reliably on paper, move up to using real money, but only with one contract per position. When that is successful, slowly increase your size to 2, 3, 5, 10, and 20 contracts. Pretty soon, you will be swinging around 1,000 contracts a lot like I do. The further you move down the learning curve the greater you can increase your size and your risk. If you never get past the paper stage at least it’s not costing you any money.
I hope this helps.
Good luck and good trading.
John Thomas
CEO & Publisher
The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader
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Good luck and good trading.
John Thomas
Global Market Comments
December 13, 2018
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH APPLE?),
(AAPL), (MSFT), (KO), (AMZN), (CLX), (NFLX),
(WHY YOUR OTHER INVESTMENT NEWSLETTER IS SO DANGEROUS)
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