My former employer, The Economist, once the ever tolerant editor of my flabby, disjointed, and juvenile prose (Thanks Peter and Marjorie), has released its new ?Big Mac? index of international currency valuations.

Although initially launched as a joke three decades ago, I have followed it religiously and found it an amazingly accurate predictor of future economic success.

The index counts the cost of McDonald?s (MCD) premium sandwich around the world.

I can personal confirm the top end of the index in Switzerland at $6.59 for a Big Mac. This is the price of the sandwich only, not of the full meal including cholesterol loaded French fries and a sugar and caffeine laden drink.

In Basel, Zermatt, and Geneva I dashed into shops to check prices, but didn?t buy anything. The staff there must have thought I was ?MAD,? while my traveling companions were deeply annoyed.

In fact, my doctors banned me from this heart attack on a plate years ago.

The bottom end of the Index can be found in Malaysia, where the median annual salary of only $4,500 can justify a price no higher than $1.99. There is also a cultural preference for chicken products in this Islamic country.

What are the Index's conclusions today?

The Swiss franc (FXF), the Norwegian krone, the Swedish krona, and, and the Euro (FXE) are overvalued, while the Hong Kong dollar, the Chinese Yuan (CYB), and the Thai Baht are cheap.

The US dollar (UUP) is now at the highish end of the range.

I couldn?t agree more with many of these conclusions. It?s as if the august weekly publication was tapping The Diary of the Mad Hedge Fund Trader for ideas.

I only learned last week that McDonald?s is removing high fructose corn syrup from its hamburgers. I never knew it was in there!

Still, it points to the company?s determination to move forward with healthier alternatives, as is the rest of the entire food industry.

That may partially explain the outsized performance of the shares over the past year, up 40.52%.

I am no longer the frequent consumer of Big Macs that I once was, as at my advanced age, my metabolism has slowed to such an extent that in eating one, I might as well tape it to my ass.

Price rises also haven?t helped. When my mom took her seven kids to the Golden Arches during the 1950?s, the hamburgers were ten cents apiece.

Better to use it as an economic forecasting tool than a speedy lunch.

The Big Mac in Yen is Definitely Not a Buy

Legendary Fortune Magazine editor, Winslow Jones, created the first hedge fund out of a shabby office on Broadway Avenue in New York City in 1948, and generated monster returns over the next 20 years.

He got the idea of a 20% performance bonus, now an industry standard, from ancient Phoenician sea captains who kept a fifth of the profits from successful voyages. Jones must have had a historical bent.

Then came the second generation titans, George Soros, Julian Robertson, and Michael Steinhardt, who made their debut in the sixties.

I count myself among the third generation along with Paul Tudor Jones and Louis Bacon, who launched funds in the late eighties, when there were still fewer than 200 funds and $25 million was considered a lot of money.

The really big money showed up in the nineties when the pension funds found them.

After that, we suffered through the many ordeals that followed, including the collapse of Long Term Capital in 1998, the Amaranth blow up in natural gas in 2006, the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in 2008, and John Paulson?s hair raising 50% draw down in 2011.

Today there are over 7,000 hedge funds, thought to manage some $2.73 trillion, which dominate all financial markets.

Fall is approaching, when my most loyal subscribers are to be found taking transcontinental railroad journeys, crossing the Atlantic in a first class suite on the Queen Mary 2, or getting the early jump on the Caribbean beaches.

What better time to spend your trading profits than after all the kids have gone back to school, the summer vacation destination crush has subsided, and travel deals abound.

It?s an empty nester's paradise.

Trading in the stock market is reflecting as much, with an increasingly narrowing range since the S&P 500 hit a new all time high in mid-July.

Is it really August already?

It?s as if through some weird, Rod Serling type time flip, June became August, when we usually get our half year low, thanks to the ill conceived Brexit.

Welcome to the misplaced summer market.

I say all this, because the longer the market moves sideways, the more investors get nervous and start bailing on their overweight cash positions.

Call it FOMO: the Fear of Missing Out.

The perma bears are always out there in force (it sells more newsletters), and with the memories of the 2008 crash still fresh and painful, the fears of a sudden market meltdown are constant and ever present.

In the minds of many newly gun-shy traders, the next 1,000 point flash crash is only an opening away.

Only a short position in the Japanese yen (FXY) seems to be working today, which followers of my Trade Alert Service have in abundance.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

What we are seeing unfold here is not the PRICE correction that people are used to, but a TIME correction, where the averages move sideways for a while.

Eventually, the moving averages catch up, and it is off to the races once again.

The reality is that there is a far greater risk of an impending market MELT UP IN STOCK PRICES than a melt down. But to understand why, we must delve further into history, and then the fundamentals.

For a start, many investors have not believed in this bull market for a nanosecond from the very beginning. They have been pouring their new cash into the bond market instead. The ultra low yields prove my point.

Some 95% of active managers are underperforming their benchmark indexes this year, the lowest level since 1997, compared to only 76% in a normal year.

Therefore, this stock market has ?CHASE? written all over it.

Too many managers have only four months left to make their years, lest they spend 2017 driving a taxi for Uber and handing out free bottles of water, or subleasing their homes through Airbnb.

The rest of 2016 will be one giant ?beta? (outperformance) chase.

You can?t blame these guys for being scared. My late mentor, Morgan Stanley?s money management guru Barton Biggs, taught me that bull markets climb a never-ending wall of worry.

And what a wall it has been.

Worry has certainly been in abundance this year, what with China confusing at best, ISIS on the loose, Syria exploding, Iraq falling to pieces, the contentious presidential elections looming, oil in free fall again, the worst summer fires in decades, flaccid economic growth, and even a rampaging Donald Trump.

We also have to be concerned that my former Berkeley professor, Fed governor Janet Yellen, is going to unsheathe a giant sword and start hacking away at bond prices, as she has already done with quantitative easing (I?ve been watching Game of Thrones too much).

Let me give you a little personal insight here into the thinking of Janet Yellen. It?s all about the jobs. Any hints about rate rises have been head fakes, especially when they come from a small, anti QE Fed minority.

When in doubt, Janet is all about easy money, until proven otherwise. Until then, think lower rates for longer, even on the heels of the blockbuster 255,000 July nonfarm payroll.

So I think we have a nice set up here going into Q4. It could be a Q4 2015 lite-- a gain of 5% in a cloud of dust.

The sector leaders will be the usual suspects, big technology names, health care, and biotech (IBB). Banks (BAC), (JPM), (KBE) will get a steroid shot as the new value plays.

To add some spice to your portfolio (perhaps at the cost of some sleepless nights), you can dally in some big momentum names, like Tesla (TSLA), Netflix (NFLX), Lennar Housing (LEN), and Facebook (FB).

Back at the Wheel Again