“The VIX right here is unsustainably low. I think China has more of a downside surprise. Analyst expectations for earnings are overly aggressive. There are just a few too many things that can go wrong out there,” said Vadim Zlotnikov, chief market strategist at Alliance Bernstein.
It’s happened again.
Another long term follower of the Mad Hedge Fund Trader has informed me that he is hanging up his trading spurs and retiring from the game.
Thanks to the millions he has made following my trade alerts, he now has more time to spend on his boat in the Caribbean, taking trips to Europe, and coaching his kids’ sports team.
He was 50.
He confided in me that my service enabled him to retire 15 years ahead of schedule.
As a result, he has created an opening to the Mad Hedge Fund Trader Concierge Service, a program that is aimed at our most valuable clients where I limit the service to only ten clients at any one time.
The goal is to provide high net worth individuals with the extra degree of assistance they may require in managing diversified portfolios. Tax, political, and economic issues will all be covered.
It is also the ideal service for the small and medium-sized hedge fund that lacks the resources to support their own in-house global strategist full time.
The service includes the following:
1) A risk analysis of your own personal portfolio with the goal of focusing your investment in the highest return sectors for the long term.
2) A monthly phone call from John Thomas to update you on the current state of play in the global financial markets.
3) Personal meetings with John Thomas anywhere in the world once a year to continue our in-depth discussions.
The cost for this highly personalized, bespoke service is $10,000 a year.
To best take advantage of Mad Hedge Fund Trader Concierge Service, you should possess the following:
1) Be an existing subscriber the Mad Hedge Fund Trader Pro who is already well aware of our strengths and limitations.
2) Have a liquid net worth of over $500,000.
3) Possess a degree of knowledge and sophistication of financial markets. This is NOT for beginners.
To subscribe to Mad Hedge Fund Trader Concierge Service, please email Filomena at support@madhedgefundtrader.com. Please put “Concierge Candidate” in the subject line.
I look forward to hearing from you.
The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader is now celebrating its 12th year of publication.
During this time, I have religiously pumped out 1,500 words a day, or eight double-space typed pages of original, independent-minded, hard-hitting, and often wickedly funny research.
I’ve been covering stocks, bonds, commodities, energy, precious metals, real estate, and agricultural products.
You’ve been kept up on my travels around the world and listened in on my conversations with those who drive the financial markets.
I also occasionally opine on politics, but only when it has a direct market impact, such as with the recent administration’s economic and trade policies.
The site now contains over 12 million words or 13 times the length of Tolstoy’s epic War and Peace.
Unfortunately, it feels like I have written on every possible topic at least 100 times over.
So, I am reaching out to you, the reader, to suggest new areas of research that I may have missed until now which you believe justify further investigation.
Please send any and all ideas directly to me at support@madhedgefundtrader.com/, and put “RESEARCH IDEA” in the subject line.
The great thing about running an online business is that I can evolve it to meet your needs on a daily basis.
Many of the new products and services that I have introduced since 2008 have come at your suggestion. That has enabled me to improve the product’s quality to your benefit.
This originally started out as a daily email to my hedge fund investors giving them an update on fast market-moving events. That was at a time when the financial markets were in free fall, and the end of the world seemed near.
Here’s a good trading rule of thumb: Usually, the world doesn’t end. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes.
The daily emails gave me the scalability that I so desperately needed. Today’s global mega enterprise grew from there. Today, the Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader and its Global Trading Dispatch are read in over 140 countries by 24,000 followers. The Mad Hedge Technology Letter and the Mad Hedge Biotech & Healthcare Letter also have substantial followings.
I’m weak in North Korea and Mali, in both cases due to the lack of electricity. But that may change.
If you want to read my first pitiful attempt at a post, please click here for my February 1, 2008 post.
It urged readers to buy gold at $950 (it soared to $1,920), and buy the Euro at $1.50 (it went to $1.60).
Now you know why this letter has become so outrageously popular.
Unfortunately, I also recommended that they sell bonds short. I wasn’t wrong on that one, just early, about eight years too early.
I always get asked how long will I keep doing this?
The government tells me that the latest I can start drawing down on my retirement funds and Social Security is 70. That’s some three years off for me.
Given the absolute blast I have doing this job, that is highly unlikely. Take a look at the testimonials I get on an almost daily basis and you’ll see why this business is so hard to walk away from (click here for those.)
In the end, you are going to have to pry my cold dead fingers off of this keyboard to get me to give up.
Fiat Lux (Let there be light).
As you may imagine, the most interesting man in the world is impossible to shop for when it comes to Christmas and birthdays.
So, it was no surprise when I opened a box and found a DNA testing kit from 23 and Me. So, I spit into a small test tube to humor the kids, mailed it off, and forgot about it.
I have long been a keeper of the Thomas family history and legends, so it would be interesting to learn which were true and which were myths.
A month later, what I discovered was amazing.
For a start, I am related to Louis the 16th, the last Bourbon king of France who was beheaded after the 1789 revolution.
I am a direct descendant from Otzi the Iceman who is 5,000 years old and was recently discovered frozen in an Alpine glacier. He currently resides in mummified form in an Italian museum.
Oh, one more. The reason I don’t have any hair on my back is that I carry 346 gene fragments that I inherited directly from a Neanderthal. Yes, I am part caveman, although past girlfriends suspected as much.
There were other conclusions.
I have a higher than average probability of getting prostate cancer, advanced macular degeneration (my mother had it), celiac disease, and melanoma.
The service also offered to introduce me to 1,107 close relatives around the world who I didn’t know, mostly in New York, California, and Florida.
The French connection I already knew about. During the 16th century, my ancestors rebelled against the French kings over the non-payment of taxes and were exiled to Louisiana. Fleeing a malaria epidemic, they moved up the Mississippi River to St. Louis and stayed there for 200 years. When gold was discovered in California in 1849, they joined a wagon train west. We have been here ever since.
I am half Italian and have birth certificates going back to 1800 to prove it. But 23 and Me says that I am only 40.7% Italian (see table below). It turns out that your genes show not only where you came from, but also who invaded your home country since the beginning of time.
In Italy’s case that would include the ancient Greeks, Vikings, Arabs, the Normans, French, Germans, and the Spanish, thus making up my other 9.3%. Your genes also reflect the slaves your ancestors owned, for obvious reasons, as well as many of the servants who may have worked for them.
It gets better.
All modern humans are decended from a single primordial “Eve” who lived in Eastern Africa 180,000 years ago. Of the thousands of homo sapiens who probably lived at that time, the genes of no other human made it into the modern age. We are all decended from a single “Adam” who lived 275,000 years ago. Obviously, the two never met, debunking some modern conventions.
Around 53,000 years ago, my intrepid ancestors cross the Red Sea to a lush jungle in the Sinai Penninsula probably pursuing abundant game. 53,000 years ago, they moved on the vast grasslands of the Cental Asian Steppes. As the last Ice Age retreated, they moved into the warmer climes of South Europe. We have been there ever since.
23 and Me was founded in 2006 by Anne Wojcicki, wife of Google founder Sergei Brin. It is owned today by her and a few other partners. Its name is based on the fact that humans’ entire DNA code is found on 23 chromosomes.
23 and Me and other competitors like Ancestry.com, MyHeritage, and Living DNA have sparked a DNA boom that has led to once unimaged economic and social consequences. DNA promises to be for the 21st century what electricity was to the 20th century. The investment consequences are amazing.
Talk about unintended consequences with a turbocharger.
A common ancestor going back to the early 1800s enabled Sacramento police to capture the Golden State killer. Unsolved for 40 years, it took a week for them to find him after a DNA sample was sent to a DNA database.
Thirty and 40-year cold cases are now being solved on a weekly basis. Long ago kidnapped children are being reunited with parents after decades of separation.
California just froze all executions. That’s because DNA evidence showed that approximately 30% of all capital case convictions were of innocent men. That was enough for me to change my own view on the death penalty. The error rate was just too high. Dozens of men around the country have been freed after new DNA evidence surfaced, some after serving 30 years or more in prison.
23 and Me had some medical advice for me as well. They strongly recommended that I get tested for diabetes and high blood pressure as these maladies are rife among my ancestors. They even name the specific guilty gene and haploid group.
This explains why major technology companies, like Amazon (AMZN) and Apple (AAPL), are pouring billions of dollars into genetic research.
I have long had a personal connection with DNA research. I worked on the team that sequenced the first ever string of DNA at UCLA in 1974. It was groundbreaking work. We obtained our raw DNA from Dr. James Watson of Harvard who, along with Francis Crick, was the first to discover its three-dimensional structure. As for my UCLA professor, Dr. Winston Salser, he went on to found Amgen (AMGN) in 1980 and became a billionaire.
The developments that are taking place today then seemed to us like science fiction that was hundreds of years into the future. To see the paper created by this work, please click here.
As research into DNA advances, it is about to pervade every aspect of our lives. Do you have a high probability of getting a disease that costs a million dollars to cure and is counting on getting health insurance? Think again. That may well bring forward single-payer national healthcare for the US, as only the government could absorb that kind of liability.
And if you can only hang on a few years, you might live forever. That’s when DNA-based monoclonal antibodies and gene editing are about to cure all major human diseases. DNA is about to become central to your physical health and your financial health as well.
To learn more about 23 and Me please visit their website here.
Maybe the next time I visit the Versaille Palace outside of Paris, I should ask for a set of keys now that I’m a relative? Unfortunately, it’s much more likely that I’ll get the keys to my Neanderthal ancestor’s cave.
While winging my way across the South Pacific last week, I spotted a fascinating job offer in the Australian newspapers:
WANTED: Social worker, tax-free salary of $60,000 with free accommodation and transportation, no experience necessary, must be flexible and self-sufficient.
With the unemployment rate at 3.1%, but much of the job growth at the minimum wage level, I was amazed that they were even advertising for such a job. Usually, such plum positions get farmed out to a close relative of the hiring officials involved.
Intrigued, I read on.
To apply, you first had to fly to Auckland, New Zealand, then catch a flight to Tahiti. After that, you must endure another long flight to the remote Gambier Islands, then charter a boat for a 36-hour voyage.
Once there, you had to row ashore to a hidden cove on the island, as there was no dock or even a beach.
It turns out that the job of a lifetime is on remote Pitcairn Island, some 2,700 miles ENE of New Zealand, home to the modern descendants of the mutineers of the HMS Bounty.
History buffs will recall that in 1790, Fletcher Christian led a rebellion against the tyrannical Captain William Bligh, casting him adrift in a lifeboat.
He then kidnapped several Tahitian women and disappeared off the face of the earth. When he stumbled across Pitcairn, which was absent from any contemporary charts, he burned the ship to avoid detection.
A lost, off-course British ship didn’t find the island until some 40 years later only to find that Christian had been killed for his involvement in a love triangle decades earlier.
The job is not without its challenges. There is one doctor, and electric power is switched on only 10 hours a day. Supply ships visit every three months. The local language is a blend of 18th century English and Tahitian called Pitkern, for which there is no dictionary.
Previous workers have a history of going native. Oh, and 10% of the island’s 54 residents are registered sex offenders, due to its long history of incest.
The next time someone you know complains about being unable to find a job, just tell them they are not looking hard enough, and to brush up on their Pitkern.
For more on the jobs situation, please click here to visit my website.
“The Obamacare website had technical issues all week because of too much web traffic. You can’t campaign on the fact that too many people don’t have health care, and then be surprised that millions don’t have health care. That’s like 1-800-FLOWERS being caught off guard by Valentine’s Day,” said a comedian on Saturday Night Live.
“The bubble is in the bond market, not the stock market,” said Leon Cooperman, CEO of Omega Advisors, an original investor in my 1990s hedge fund.
“It’s a funny thing about life. If you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it,” said British Novelist, Somerset Maugham.
“Sometimes, when you jump off a bridge, you have to grow your wings on the way down,” said author Danielle Steele.
“Just because you paid more for a company doesn’t mean it’s earning more,” said Oracle of Omaha Warren Buffet.
