Global Market Comments
August 7, 2019
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(WHY I SOLD SHORT MACYS’),
(AMZN), (WMT), (M), (JWN), (KOL)
(TESTIMONIAL)
Sorry, the Trade Alert to sell short Macys’ (M) went out late yesterday. I was speaking to a retail expert and his list of things wrong with the marquee name was so long that I couldn't get off the phone. New Yorkers are going to have to find something else to do on Thanksgiving Day than attend their famous parade.
His bottom line? Retail is in a death spiral from which it will never recover. Trying on clothes in a shopping mall will soon become a thing of the past, going the way of the buggy whip, black and white TV, and six-track tapes.
If you had to pick the biggest loser of our ongoing trade wars, which have just been ratcheted up in intensity, it would be the retail industry (XRT). Higher costs and tariffs can’t be passed on, minimum wages are rising in the big cities, lower selling prices are lower, and a massive inventory glut is NOT what money-making is all about.
The stocks have delivered as expected, providing one of the worst-performing sectors of 2019. Half of them probably won’t even make it until 2020.
In fact, Sears (S) and Macy’s (M) have announced more store closings nationwide. The overhead is killing them in a micro margin world.
So, I stopped at a Walmart (WMT) the other day on my way to Napa Valley to find out why.
I am not normally a customer of this establishment. But I was on my way to a meeting where a dozen red long-stem roses would prove useful. I happened to know you could get these for $10 a dozen at Walmart.
After I found my flowers, I browsed around the store to see what else they had for sale. The first thing I noticed was that half the employees were missing their front teeth.
The clothing offered was out of style and made of cheap material. It might as well have been the Chinese embassy. Most concerning, there was almost no one there, customers OR employees.
The Macy’s downsizing is only the latest evidence of a major change in the global economy that has been evolving over the last two decades.
However, it now appears we have reached both a tipping point and a point of no return. The future is happening faster than anyone thought possible. Call it the Death of Retail.
I remember the first purchases I made at Amazon 20 years ago. Even though I personally knew the founder, Jeff Bezos, from my Morgan Stanley days, the idea sounded so dubious that I made my initial purchases with a credit card with only a low $1,000 limit. That way, if the wheels fell off, my losses would be limited.
And how stupid was that name Amazon, anyway? At least, he didn’t call it “Yahoo” because it was already taken.
Today, I do almost all of my shopping at Amazon (AMZN). It saves me immense amounts of time while expanding my choices exponentially. And I don’t have to fight traffic, engage in the parking space wars, or wait in line to pay.
It can accommodate all of my requests, no matter how bizarre or esoteric. A WWII reproduction Army Air Corps canvas flight jacket in size XXL? No problem!
A used 42-inch Sub Zero refrigerator with a front-door icemaker and water dispenser? Have it there in two days, with free shipping at one fifth the $17,000 full retail price.
So I was not surprised when I learned this morning that Amazon accounted for 25% of all new online sales in 2018 in a market that is already growing at a breathtaking 20% YOY.
In 2000, after the great “Y2K” disaster that failed to show, I met with Bill Gates Sr. to discuss his foundation’s investments.
It turned out that they had liquidated their entire equity portfolio and placed all their money into bonds, a brilliant move coming mere months before the Dotcom bust and a 16-year bull market in fixed income.
Mr. Gates (another Eagle Scout) mentioned something fascinating to me. He said that unlike most other foundations their size, they hadn’t invested a dollar in commercial real estate.
It was his view that the US economy would move entirely online, everyone would work from home, emptying out city centers and rendering commuting unnecessary. Shopping malls would become low-rent climbing walls and paintball game centers.
Mr. Gates’ prediction may finally be occurring. Some counties in the San Francisco Bay area now see 25% of their workers telecommuting.
It is becoming common for staff to work Tuesday-Thursday at the office, and from home on Monday and Friday. Productivity increases. People are bending their jobs to fit their lifestyles. And oh yes, happy people work for less money in exchange for personal freedom, boosting profits.
The Mad Hedge Fund Trader itself may be a model for the future. We are entirely a virtual company with no office. Everyone works at home in four countries around the world. Oh, and we all use Amazon to do our shopping.
The downside to this is that whenever there is a snowstorm anywhere in the country, it affects our output. Two storms are a disaster, and at three, such as last winter, we grind to a virtual halt.
You may have noticed that I can work from anywhere and anytime (although sending a Trade Alert from the back of a camel in the Sahara Desert was a stretch), so was sending out an Alert while hanging on the cliff face of a Swiss Alp, but they both made money.
Moroccan cell coverage is better than ours, but the dromedary’s swaying movement made it hard to hit the keys.
The cost of global distribution is essentially zero. Profits go into a bonus pool shared by all. Oh, and we’re hiring, especially in marketing.
It is happening because the entire “bricks and mortar” industry is getting left behind by the march of history.
Sure, they have been pouring millions into online commerce and jazzed up websites. But they all seem to be poor imitations of Amazon with higher prices. It is all “Hour late and dollar short” stuff.
In the meantime, Amazon soared by 49% from December to the May high, and was one of the top performing stocks of 2018. There are now a cluster of Amazon analyst forecasts around the $3,000 mark.
And here is the bad news. Bricks and Mortar retailers are about to lose more of their lunch to Chinese Internet giant Alibaba (BABA), which is ramping up its US operations and is FOUR TIMES THE SIZE OF AMAZON!
There’s a good reason why you haven’t heard much from me about retailers. I made the decision 30 years ago never to touch the troubled sector.
I did this when I realized that management never knew beforehand which of their products would succeed, and which would bomb, and therefore were constantly clueless about future earnings.
The business for them was an endless roll of the dice. That is a proposition in which I was unwilling to invest. There were always better trades.
I confess that I had to look up the ticker symbols for this story as I never use them.
You will no doubt be enticed to buy retail stocks as the deal of the century by the talking heads on TV, Internet research, and maybe even your own brokers, citing how “cheap” they are.
Never confuse a low stock price with “cheap.”
It will be much like buying the coal industry (KOL) a few years ago, another industry headed for the dustbin of history. That was when “cheap” was on its way to zero for almost every company.
So the next time someone recommends that you buy retail stocks, you should probably lie down and take a long nap first. When you awaken, hopefully the temptation will be gone.
Or better yet, go shopping at Amazon. The deals are to die for.
To read “An Evening with Bill Gates Sr.”, please click here.
"Send us your freaks," said an Amazon human resources executive to a temp agency during its early days.
Global Market Comments
August 6, 2019
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(I HAVE AN OPENING FOR THE MAD HEDGE FUND TRADER CONCIERGE SERVICE),
(DON’T MISS THE AUGUST 7 GLOBAL STRATEGY WEBINAR),
(HAVE WE SEEN “PEAK AUTO SALES”),
(GM), (TM), (F), (HMC), (TSLA), (NSANY),
My next global strategy webinar will be held live on Wednesday, August 7, at 12:00 PM EDT.
Co-hosting the show will be Mad Day Trader Bill Davis.
I’ll be giving you my updated outlook on stocks, bonds, commodities, currencies, precious metals, and real estate.
The goal is to find the cheapest assets in the world to buy, the most expensive to sell short, and the appropriate securities with which to take these positions.
I will also be opining on recent political events around the world and the investment implications therein.
I usually include some charts to highlight the most interesting new developments in the capital markets. There will be a live chat window with which you can pose your own questions.
The webinar will last 45 minutes to an hour. International readers who are unable to participate in the webinar live will find it posted on my website within a few hours.
I look forward to hearing from you.
To log into the webinar, please click on the link we emailed you entitled, "Next Bi-Weekly Webinar – August 7, 2019" or click here.
There is no limit to my desire to get an early and accurate read on the US economy, which at the end of the day is what dictates the future returns on our investments.
I flew over one of my favorite leading economic indicators only last week.
Honda (HMC) and Nissan (NSANY) import millions of cars each year through their Benicia, California facilities where they are loaded on to hundreds of rail cars for shipment to points inland as far as Chicago.
In 2009, when the US car market shrank to an annualized 8.5 million units, I flew over the site and it was choked with thousands of cars parked bumper to bumper in their white plastic wrappings, rusting in the blazing sun and bereft of buyers.
Then, “cash for clunkers” hit (remember that?). The lots were emptied in a matter of weeks, with mile-long trains lumbering inland, only stopping to add extra engines to get over the High Sierras at Donner Pass. The stock market took off like a rocket, with the auto companies leading.
I flew over the site last weekend, and guess what? The lots are full again. Not only that, the trains lined up to take them away are gone. US Auto Sales peaked in October 2017 when they fell just short of a 19 million annualized rate. As of the end of June this year, they had fallen to a 15.1 million annualized rate. July is looking worse still.
And this is what I’m worried about. Auto Sales may not only be peaking for this economic cycle. They may be peaking for all time.
This is my logic.
As they slowly age, Millennials are about to become the principal buyers of automobiles. The problem is that Millennials are purchasing cars at a far slower rate than previous generations.
This is because they have a much higher concentration in urban areas where the cost of car ownership is the most expensive in history. $40 for parking for an evening? Give me a break. But good luck finding free on-street parking, and if you do, your windows will probably get smashed.
In cities like San Francisco, public transportation, bicycles, and electric scooters are the preferred mode of transportation.
It doesn’t help that this generation is shouldering the burden of the bulk of $1.5 trillion in student loan debt. When you owe $2,000 a month in interest, there is little room for a car payment, and you probably don’t have the credit rating to buy a car anyway.
When they do buy cars, all-electric is their first choice, if they can get access to overnight charging. A lot of companies are making this easy by offering free charging for electric commuters in corporate parking lots. This explains why Tesla (TSLA) has taken deposits from 400,000 for their low-end Tesla 3, which has a two-year waiting list for new buyers.
When Millennials do drive, such as on business, for weekend trips or summer vacations, they either rent or “share.” Driving around the city, you see cars parked everywhere with bizarre names like Upshift, Getaround, Zipcar, Turo, and Casual Carpool.
Indeed, Detroit takes the car-sharing threat so seriously that the Big Three have all bought into the technology, with General Motors taking a stake in Maven. (GM) plans to start its own peer-to-peer car-sharing service this summer.
This is all a mystery for my generation, which grew up tearing apart old cars and putting them back together. I spent a year trying to put the engine on my 1955 Volkswagen back together. When I gave up, I towed the car and a big box full of greasy parts to a local mechanic, a German Army veteran. When he finished, even he had four parts left over.
Do you know who believes my rash, possible MAD theory? Investors in auto stocks, one of the worst-performing sectors of the stock market this year. Shares like those of General Motors (GM) keep breaking new valuation lows.
What was (GM)’s price earnings multiple today? Try a miserable zero since the company loses money, one of the lowest of all S&P 500 stocks. Hapless portfolio managers keep getting sucked into the shares, which have become one of the ultimate value traps.
It is all further evidence that my cautious view on the US economy is correct, that multiple crises overseas are ahead of us, and that the stock market could drop 5%-10% at any time. The auto industry should lead the charge to the downside, especially General Motors (GM) and Ford (F).
As for Tesla (TSLA), better to buy the car than the stock.
Sorry, the photo is a little crooked, but it's tough holding a camera in one hand and a plane's stick with the other while flying through the turbulence of the San Francisco Bay’s Carquinez Straight.
Air traffic control at nearby Travis Air Force base usually has a heart attack when I conduct my research in this way, with a few joyriding C-130s having more than one near miss.
Global Market Comments
August 5, 2019
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(MARKET OUTLOOK FOR THE WEEK AHEAD, or TAKING THE ELEVATOR DOWN),
($INDU), (SPY), (TLT), (IWM), (WMT), (FXB)
It is often said the markets take the escalator up and the elevator down. A thousand Dow points in three days? That’s like taking the elevator down from the 101st floor of the Empire State Building down to the basement in one shot.
Welcome to your new $30 billion tax, or about $90 per American per year. That will be the effect of the new 10% tariff increase on $300 billion worth of goods imported from China. Unfortunately, this comes on top of an existing $210 per American, bring the total bill due from the China trade war to $300 per person.
Clearly, the Chinese think they can get a better deal from the next president and are inclined to wait it out. This has been my base case since the trade war started 18 months ago.
It was one of the most frenetic, emotion-charged, and violent weeks of the year, with almost daily wild swings on a daily basis. This is the environment where hedge funds and newsletters like this one earn their pay.
The July Nonfarm Payroll Report came in at 164,000, keeping the headline unemployment report to 3.7%. Average hourly earnings grew by a hot 3.2% YOY. The previous two months were revised down by 41,000. Overall, it was a disappointing report.
Manufacturing has been especially weak all year, adding only 16,000 jobs in July and averaging 8,000 jobs a month all year. The headline charge into the services economy continues. Retail lost 3,600, the sixth consecutive monthly decline. The strength was in Professional Services, up 31,000, Health Care at 30,000, and Social Assistance at 20,000.
The broader U-6 “discouraged worker” structural unemployment rate dropped from 7.2% to 7.0%, a new cycle low.
The British Pound (FXB) crashed by 1%, as the harsh reality of a hard Brexit looms. That’s because Boris Johnson, the pro Brexit activist, was named UK prime minister and filled his cabinet with anti-EC doormats. It virtually guarantees a recession there and will act as an additional drag on the US economy.
The end result may be a “Disunited Kingdom”, with Scotland declaring independence in order to stay in the EC, and Northern Ireland splitting off to create a united Emerald Island. The stock market there will crater and the pound will go to parity against the greenback.
Home Price Gains are Still Shrinking, from a 3.5% to a 3.4% annual gain in May, according to the S&P Corelogic Case Shiller National Home Price Index. The Median Home Price hit a new high of $285,700. That can’t buy you a parking space in San Francisco. This is removing a major leg from the economy.
Las Vegas saw the biggest increase at 6.4%, followed by Phoenix at 5.7% and Tampa at 5.1%. Shrinking price gains in the face of falling interest rates is a classic pre-recessionary indicator.
Apple hurdled a low bar, with an upward forward guidance delivering a 5% pop in the stock. Revenues rose 1% to $53.8 billion, while profits dropped 7%. The future looks bright on the eve of 5G iPhones. Hardware drops to less than half of sales for the first time. Services revenues jump to 21% of the total.
China is still a drag. Amazingly, Apple only bought $17 billion worth of its own stock last quarter against a commitment of $100 billion. So why are analyst “BUY” ratings at a decade low? Maybe it's because threats of retaliation in the China trade war are hanging over Apple like a sword of Damocles.
It took only three words to kill Wall Street. Confusion reigns. “Mid Cycle Adjustment” was how Fed governor Jay Powell described Wednesday’s 25 basis point interest rate cut, the first in 12 years, absolutely what the market didn’t want to hear. That implies that the Fed is “one and done,” and that there will be no more interest rate cuts in this economic cycle.
The president added insult to injury piling abuse on his own appointee, further eroding confidence in the independence of the Fed. A truly data dependent Fed wouldn’t have budged last week.
Bonds soared on “one and done.” Higher rates for longer give a new lease on life for the fixed income markets everywhere. Since 2008, major central bank balance sheets have exploded from $3 trillion to $16 trillion, and there is nowhere better for this mountain of money to go but the ten-year US Treasury bond.
Yields have smashed the four-year low at 1.82% and are headed to 1.40% by yearend. The market is wildly overbought for now on the back of an instant three-point rally, so keep buying those dips. Next up is the century low in rates.
Oil crashed 8% on increased global recession fears, in the worst plunge in four years and one of the biggest swan dives in history. The strong dollar doesn’t help either. I have recommended that investors avoid energy like the plague all year and it has worked like a charm. Long term, it’s going out of business anyway, so I don’t even want to trade it here.
Retailers got destroyed on the China news, with stocks down 6%-12% across the board. Best Buy (BBY) did a 12% swan dive. This will be the stick that broke the camel’s back for a lot of retailers already hanging on by their fingernails. Some 42% of US apparel, 69% of footwear, and 84% of accessories come from China.
Squeezed by Amazon on one side and administration China policies on the other, this will spell the death of retail. It looks like we’re going to have to go barefoot this winter. Thank goodness there’s global warming. The death spiral was further confirmed by the weak jobs figures in retail this morning.
I went into the week 100% in cash, giving me the dry powder to pursue the short side aggressively. I always tell followers that cash is a position, that it has option value, and this was a classic example of how well that can work.
The second I heard about the China tariff increase, I went pedal to the metal and increased my shorts from 0% to 40%, against 60% cash. My current shorts include the S&P 500 (SPY), US Treasury bonds (TLT), the Russel 2000 (IWM), and the giant retailer (WMT).
I see August as the best short selling opportunity of the year. I put out my first shorts the day after the Fed rate cut. My Global Trading Dispatch has hit a new all-time high of 320.30% and my year-to-date shot up at +20.16%. A robust earned a robust 1.83% so far in August, and 4.78% since I went back into the market from Zermatt, Switzerland three weeks ago.
My ten-year average annualized profit bobbed up to +33.13%. My Mad Hedge Market Timing Index saw one of the sharpest declines in its history, plunging from 65 to 23 on only two days. We could even be back to “BUY” territory by the end of next week.
The coming week will be a feeble one on the data front. Believe it or not, it could be a quiet week.
On Monday, August 5 at 2:00 PM, the July ISM Non-Manufacturing PMI is out.
On Tuesday, August 6 at 2:00 PM, the June JOLTS Jobs Openings report is published.
On Wednesday, August 7, at 8:30 AM, June Consumer Credit is released.
On Thursday, August 8 at 8:30 AM, the Weekly Jobless Claims are printed.
On Friday, August 9 at 8:30 AM, July Core Purchasing Price Index is printed, an inflation indicator.
The Baker Hughes Rig Count follows at 2:00 PM.
As for me, believe it or not, I have not been to the beach this year. As a native Californian, that is near high treason. So I am loading up the old Tesla with an ice chest, boogie boards, and kids and headed to nearby Stinson Beach in Marin County. I’m going early to beat the traffic and will take my usual short cuts I learned while living there eons ago.
Surf’s up!
Good luck and good trading.
John Thomas
CEO & Publisher
The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader
Global Market Comments
August 2, 2019
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(DON’T MISS THE AUGUST 7 GLOBAL STRATEGY WEBINAR),
(REPORT FROM THE WORLD)
I beat Phileas Fogg by 55 days, who needed 88 days to complete his trip around the world to settle a gentleman’s bet. But then he had to rely on elephants, sailing ships, and steam engines to complete his epic voyage, or at least the one imagined by Jules Verne.
I actually took a much longer route, using a mix of Boeings and Airbuses to fly 80 hours over 40,000 miles on 18 flights through 12 countries in only 33 days. Incredibly, our baggage made it all the way, rather than see its contents sold on the black markets of Manila, New Delhi, or Cairo.
It was a trip around the world for the ages, made even more challenging by dragging 13 and 15 year old girls along with me. I have always considered my most valuable asset to be the trips I took to Europe, Africa, and Asia in 1968. The comparisons I can make today some 51 years later are nothing less than awe-inspiring. I wanted to give the same gift to them.
It began with a 12 ½ hour flight from San Francisco to Auckland, New Zealand. Straight out of the airport, I rented a left-hand drive Land Rover and drove three hours to high in the steam-covered mountains of Rarotonga where we were dinner guests of a Maori tribe. To earn my dinner of pork and vegetables cooked underground, I had to dance the haka, a Maori war dance.
Of course, with kids in tow, a natural stop was the Hobbit Village of Hobbiton 1½ hours outside of Auckland. I figured the owners of the idyllic sheep farm were earning at least $25 million a year showing tourists the movie set.
In all, I put 1,000 miles on the car in four days, even crossing New Zealand’s highest mountain range on a dirt road. The thick forests were so primeval, my daughter expected to see a dinosaur around the next curve. We reached our southernmost point at Mt. Ruapehu, a volcano used as the inspiration for Mt. Doom in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings.
The Real Mount Doom
The focus of the Australia leg were ten strategy lectures which I presented around the country. I was mobbed at every stop, with turnout double what I expected. The Mad Hedge Fund Trader and the Mad Hedge Technology Letter picked up 100 new subscribers in the Land Down Under in five days. Maybe it was something I said?
My kids’ only requirements were to feed kangaroos and koala bears, which we duly accomplished on a freezing cold morning outside Melbourne. We also managed to squeeze in a tour of the incredible Sydney Opera house in between lectures.
I hosted five Mad Hedge Global Strategy Luncheons for existing customers in five days. The highlight was in Perth, where eight professional traders and I enjoyed a raucous, drunken meal. They had all done well off my advice, so I was popular to say the least. Someone picked up the tab without me even noticing.
After that, it was a brief ten-hour flight to Manila, Philippines with a brief changeover in Hong Kong, where massive protest demonstrations were underway. Ever the history buff, I booked myself into General Douglas MacArthur’s suite at the historic Manila Hotel. The last time I was there, I interviewed president Ferdinand Marcos and his lovely wife Imelda. After a lunch with my enthusiastic Philippine staff, I was on my way to the airport.
I took Malaysian Airlines to New Delhi, India which has lost two planes over the last five years and where the crew was definitely on edge. I asked why a second plane was lost somewhere over the South Indian Ocean and the universal response was that the pilot had gone insane. Security was so tight that they confiscated a bottle of Jamieson Irish Whiskey that I had just bought in duty free.
India turned out to be a dystopian nightmare. If global warming continues, this is your preview. With temperatures up to 120 degrees in 100% humidity, people here dying of heatstroke are by the hundreds. Elephants had to be hosed down to keep them alive. It was so hot you couldn’t stray from the air conditioning for more than an hour.
In Old Delhi, the kids were besieged by child beggars pawing them for food and there were mountains of trash everywhere. In the Taj Mahal, my older daughter passed out and we had to dump our remaining drinking water on her to bring her back to life. We spent the rest of the day sightseeing indoors at the most heavily air-conditioned shops. The handwoven Persian carpet should arrive any day now.
If global temperatures rise by just a few more degrees, you’re going to lose a billion people in India very soon.
On the way to Abu Dhabi, we flew directly over the tanker war at the Straights of Hormuz. It was too dusty to see any action there. We got a much better view of Sinai and the Red Sea, which, I told the kids, Moses parted 5,000 years ago (they’ve seen Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments)
Upon landing at Cairo, Egypt’s military intelligence service immediately picked me up. Apparently, I was still in their system dating back to my coverage of Henry Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy for The Economist in 1976. That was all a long time ago. Having two kids with me meant I was not there to cause trouble, so they were very friendly. They even gave us a free ride to the downtown Nile Hilton.
After India, Cairo and the Sahara Desert were downright pleasant, a dry and comfortable 100 degrees. We did the standard circuit, the pyramids and the Sphynx followed by a camel ride into the desert.
If you are the least bit claustrophobic, don’t even think about crawling into the center of the Great Pyramid on your hands and knees as we did. I was sore for two days. We spent the evening on a Nile dinner cruise, looking for alligators, entertained by an unusually talented belly dancer.
The next stage involved a one-day race to Greece, where we circled the Acropolis in all its glory, and then argued with a Greek taxi driver on how to get back to the airport. We ended up taking an efficient airport train, a remnant of the 2000 Athens Olympics. If impoverished and bankrupt, Athens has such great airport train, why doesn’t New York or San Francisco?
It was a quick hop across the Adriatic to Venice, Italy, where we caught an always exciting speed boat from the airport to our Airbnb near St. Mark’s Square. We ran through the ancient cathedral and the Palace of the Doges, admiring the massive canvases, the medieval weaponry, and the dungeon.
One of the high points of the trip was a performance of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in the very church it was composed for. A ferocious thunderstorm hit, flooding the plaza outside and causing the lead violinist’s string to break, halting the concert (rapid humidity change I guess).
When we got home with soggy feet, the Carabinieri had cordoned off our block with police tape because a big chunk of the 400-year-old roof had fallen into the street. It taxed my Italian to the max to get into our apartment that night. The Airbnb host asked me not to mention this in my review (I didn’t).
The next day brought a circuitous trip to Budapest via Brussels. Budapest was a charm, a former capital of the Austria Hungarian Empire and the architecture to prove it. The last time I was there 51 years ago, the Russian Army was running the place and it was grim, oppressive, and dirty.
Today, it is a thriving hot spot for Europe’s young, with bars and night clubs everywhere. Dinners dropped from $150 in Venice to $30. We topped the night with a Danube dinner cruise with a folk dancing troupe. I’m told you can live there like a king for $1,000 a month.
The next morning we drew closer to our final destination to Zurich, Switzerland. A four-hour train ride brought us to my summer chalet in Zermatt and some much-needed rest. At the end of a long valley and lacking cars, Zermatt is one of those places where you can just give the kids 50 Swiss francs and tell them to get lost. I spent mornings hiking up from the valley floor and afternoons getting caught up on the markets and my writing.
There’s nothing like recharging my batteries in the clean mountain air of the Alps. The forecast was rain every day for two weeks, but it never showed. As a result, I ended up hiking ten miles a day to the point where my legs were made of lead by the end.
The only downer was watching helicopters pick up the bodies of two climbers who fell near the top of the Matterhorn. As temperatures rise rapidly, the ice holding the mountain together melts leading to a rising tide of fatal accidents.
I caught my last flight home from Milan. Anything for one more great dinner in Italy which I enjoyed in the Galleria. At the train station, I chatted with a troop of Italian Boy Scouts in blue uniforms headed for the Italian Alps. The city was packed with Chinese tour groups, and there was a one-month wait to buy tickets for Leonardo DaVinci’s The Last Supper. Another Airbnb made sure I stayed up all night listening to the city’s yellow trolleys trundle by.
Finally, an 11-hour flight brought me back to the City by the Bay. Thanks to two sleeping pills of indeterminate origin, I went to sleep over England and woke up over Oregon preparing for a landing. It seems that somewhere along the way, I proposed marriage to the Arab woman sitting next to me, but I have no memory of that whatsoever. At least that’s what the head flight attendant thought.
My return home has me already planning next year’s trip. After Australia, should I fly up to Japan and catch the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and then go to Zermatt? Or, should I fly directly to South Africa for a safari and then make it to Switzerland? And I have to get home in time to join a 50-mile hike with the Boy Scouts in New Mexico.
What a great problem to have.
