Take those predictions, forecasts, and prognostications with so many grains of salt. ?They have a notorious track record for being completely wrong, even when made by the leading experts in their fields. In preparing for my autumn lecture series, I came across these following nuggets and thought I?d share them with you ? There are some real howlers:
1876 ?This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to
be seriously considered as a means of communication.?
-- Western Union internal memo.
1895? ?Heavier than air flying machines are impossible.?
-- Lord Kelvin, president of the Royal Society.
1927 "Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?"
-- H.M. Warner, founder of Warner Brothers.
1943 ?I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.?
-- Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM.
1962 ?We don't like their sound, and guitar music
is on the way out.?
-- Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.
1981 ?640 kilobytes of memory ought to be enough for anybody.?
-- Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft.
?This has been the worst year for active managers in history. We have never seen numbers of people missing benchmarks so large. As the markets have moved up, the tracking error has grown. People are missing about a third of the upside in the markets,? said Thomas Lee, a chief equity strategist at JP Morgan.
https://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.png00DougDhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngDougD2012-09-12 23:35:282012-09-12 23:35:28September 12, 2012 -- Quote of the Day
Since nothing less than the fate of the free world depends on the judgment of Ben Bernanke these days, I thought I?d touch base with David Wessel, the Wall Street Journal economics editor, who has just published In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke?s War on the Great Panic.
I doubted David could tell me anything more about the former Princeton professor I didn?t already know. I couldn?t have been more wrong, as David gave me some fascinating insights into the inner soul of our much-vaunted Chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Bernanke was the smartest kid in rural Dillon, South Carolina, who, through a series of improbable accidents, and intervention by a local black civil rights leader, ended up at Harvard. He built his career on studying the Great Depression, then the closest thing to paleontology economics had to offer, a field focused so distantly on the past, that it was irrelevant. Bernanke took over the Fed when Greenspan was considered a rock star, inhaling his libertarian, free-market, Ayn Rand inspired philosophy in great giant gulps.
Within a year, the economy suddenly transported itself back to the Jurassic Age, and the landscape was overrun with T-Rex?s and Brontesauri. He tried to stop the panic 150 different ways, 125 of which were terrible ideas, the remaining 25 saving us from the Great Depression II. This is why unemployment is now only 9.1%, instead of 25%.
The Fed governor is naturally a very shy and withdrawn person, and would have been quite happy limiting his political career to the Princeton, NJ school board. To rebuild confidence, he took his campaign to the masses, attending town hall meetings and pressing the flesh like a campaigning first term congressman.
The price tag for Ben?s success has been large, with the Fed balance sheet exploding from $800 million to $2.7 trillion, solely on his signature. The true cost of the financial crisis won?t be known for a decade or more. The biggest risk is that we grow complacent, having pulled back from the brink, and letting desperately needed reforms of the financial system and the rebuilding of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac slide. This is already starting to happen.
How Bernanke unwinds this bubble will define his legacy. Too soon, and we go back into a real depression. Too late, and hyperinflation hits. That?s when we find out who Ben Bernanke really is.
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/ben-1.jpg313250DougDhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngDougD2012-09-09 23:02:332012-09-09 23:02:33Who is Ben Bernanke?
A number of readers have asked me why I?m not trading now. Since I put out my calls to sell Treasury bonds in August (click here for ?The Great Treasury Bond Crash of 2010? ), and buy US stocks in September (click here for ?My Equity Scenario for the Rest of 2010? ), I have mostly been sitting on my hands. I usually try to catch three or four trend changes a year, which might generate 50-100 trades, and often come in frenzied bursts.
Since I am one of the greatest tightwads that ever walked the planet, I only like to buy positions when we are at the height of despair and despondency, and traders are raining off the Golden Gate Bridge. Similarly, I only like to sell when the markets are tripping on steroids and ecstasy, and are convinced that they can live forever.
Some 99% of the time, the markets are in the middle, and there is nothing to do but deep research, looking for the next trade. That is the purpose of this letter. Over the four decades that I have been trading, I have learned a number of tried and true rules which have saved my bacon countless times. I will share them with you.
1) Don?t over trade. This is the number one reason why individual investors lose money. Look at your trades of the past year and apply the 90/10 rule. Dump the least profitable 90% and watch your performance skyrocket. Then aim for that 10%. Over trading is a great early retirement plan for your broker, not you.
2) Always use stops. Risk control is the measure of the good hedge fund trader. If you lose all your capital on the lemons, you can?t play when the great trades set up. Consider cash as having an option value.
3) Don?t forget to sell. Date, don?t marry you positions. Remember, pigs get slaughtered. Always leave the last 10% of a move for the next guy.
4) You don?t have to be a genius to play this game. If that was required, Wall Street would have run out of players a long time ago. If you employ risk control and stops, then you can be wrong 40% of the time, and still make a living. That?s little better than a coin toss. It you are wrong only 30% of the time, you can make millions. If you are wrong a scant 20% of the time, you are heading a trading desk at Goldman Sachs. If you are wrong a scant 10% of the time, you are running a $20 billion hedge fund that the public only hears about when you pay $100 million for a pickled shark at a modern art auction. If someone says they are never wrong, as is often claimed on the Internet, run a mile, because it is impossible.
5) This is hard work. Trading attracts a lot of wide eyed, na?ve, but lazy people because it appears so easy from the outside. You buy a stock, watch it go up, and make money. How hard is that? The reality is that successful investing requires twice as much work as a normal job. The more research you put into a trade, the more comfortable you will become, and the more profitable it will be. That?s what this letter is for.
6) Don?t chase the market. If you do, it will turn back and bite you. Wait for it to come to you. If your miss the train, there will be another one along in hours, days, weeks, or months. Patience is a virtue.
7) When I put on a position, I calculate how much I am willing to lose to keep it. I then put a stop just below there. If I get triggered, I just walk away. Only enter a trade when the risk/reward is in your favor. You can start at 3:1. That means only risk a dollar to potentially make three.
8) Don?t confuse a bull market with brilliance. I am not smart, just old as dirt.
9) Tape this quote from the great economist and early hedge fund trader of the thirties, John Maynard Keynes, to you computer monitor: "Markets can remain illogical longer than you can remain solvent." Hang around long enough, and you will see this proven time and again (ten year Treasuries at 2.4%?!).
10) Don?t believe the media. I know, I used to be one of them. Look for the hard data, the numbers, and you?ll see that often the talking heads, the paid industry apologists, and politicians don?t know what they are talking about (the Gulf oil spill will create a dead zone for decades?).
11) When you are running a long/short portfolio, 80% of your time is spent managing the shorts. If you don?t want to do the work, then cash beats a short any day of the week.
12) Sometimes the conventional wisdom is right.
13) Invest like a fundamentalist, execute like a technical analyst.
14) Use technical analysis only and you will buy every rally, sell every dip, and end up broke. That said, learn what an ?outside reversal? is, and who the hell is Leonardo Fibonacci.
15) The simpler a market approach, the better it works. Everyone talks about ?buy low and sell high?, but few actually do it. All black boxes eventually blow up, if they were ever there in the first place.
16) Markets are made up of people. Understand and anticipate how they think, and you will make a lot of money.
17) Understand what information is in the market and what isn?t and you will make more money.
18) Do the hard trade, the one that everyone tells you that you are ?Mad? to do. If you add a position and then throw up afterwards, then you know you?ve done the right thing. This is why people started calling me ?Mad? 40 years ago.
19) If you are trying to get out of a hole, the first thing to do is quit digging and throw away the shovel. A blank position sheet can be invigorating.
20) Making money in the market is an unnatural act. We humans are predators and hunters evolved to track game on the horizon of an African savanna. Modern humans are maybe 5 million years old, but civilization has been around for only 10,000 years. Our brains have not had time to make the adjustment. In the market, this means that if a stock has gone up, you believe it will continue. This is why market tops and bottoms see volume spikes. To make money, you have to go against these innate instincts. Some people are born with this ability, while others can only learn it through decades of training. I am in the latter group.
The gold rush is back on in California. On my way back from Lake Tahoe recently, I saw that every bend of the American river was dotted with hopeful amateur miners, looking to make a windfall fortune.
Weekend hobbyists were there panning away from the banks, while the hardcore pros stood in hip waders balancing portable pumps on truck inner tubes, pouring sand into sluice boxes. A sharp-eyed veteran can take in $2,000 worth of gold dust a day. The new 2012?ers were driven by a price of gold at $1,700 and the attendant headlines, but also by unemployment, and recent heavy rains last winter that flushed huge new quantities of the yellow metal out of the High Sierras.
They were no doubt inspired by the chance discovery of an 8.7 ounce nugget in May near Bakersfield, worth an impressive $10,000. Local folklore says that The Sierra?s have given up only 20% of their gold, and the remaining 80% is still up there awaiting discovery. Out of work construction workers are taking their heavy equipment up to the mountains and using it to reopen mines that have been abandoned since the 19th century.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management says that mining permits in the Golden State this year have shot up from 15,606 to 23,974. Unfortunately, the big money here is being made by the sellers of supplies and services to the new miners, much as Levi Strauss and Wells Fargo did in the original 1849 gold rush. Of course, they could much more easily buy the Spider Gold Trust Shares ETF (GLD), but it wouldn?t be as much fun.
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/gold2-1.jpg276399DougDhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngDougD2012-09-06 01:01:292012-09-06 01:01:29The New California Gold Rush.
I have just finished reading the best financial book ever, and I have read most of them. It is The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the Worldby Harvard professor Niall Ferguson. It gives you a great explanation of how the broad sweep of history delivered us to the doorstep of today?s crisis.
Ferguson starts with an ancient accounting system written on clay tablets in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago, and then takes us through the economic dominance of Greece and Rome. We learn about a medieval Italian diplomat named Fibonacci, who imported advanced mathematical concepts from the Middle East, which we still trade around today. He plots the rise of the great banking dynasties, such as the Medici?s and the Rothschild?s (Jacob was my neighbor in London).
It is also a pot boiling narrative of the great financial scandals, starting with the Mississippi bubble which wrecked France, the South Sea bubble where Sir Isaac Newton lost his shirt, to the Ponzi schemes of the 20th century. The story tells us how the financial center of the world has migrated from Babylon to Cairo, Rome, Venice, Amsterdam, London, and eventually ending up in a hedge fund dominated New York.
Ferguson is particularly astute in explaining in layman?s terms the borrowing binge and the exotic, super leveraged derivatives that lead to the current crash. The author finishes with an explanation of how American overconsumption is financed by Chinese saving, and why this can?t last. If you are looking for a single tome which ties it all together, this is it. To obtain preferential pricing in the purchase of this book, please click here.
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/ferguson.jpg500329DougDhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngDougD2012-09-06 00:49:212012-09-06 00:49:21The Best Financial Book Ever.
Those who have been dying of boredom during August -- the lowest volume, tightest ranging month in many years -- may be about to get their respite. September 12 (or Wednesday next week) offers a potential cornucopia of either fantastically good or terribly bad news, and maybe both.
Let me give you a program of the upcoming events on this momentous day:
*The German Supreme Court renders its decision on the legality of the country?s bailout of troubled southern Europe. If they approve, as expected, the Euro should rally to a new multi-month high, possibly as high as $1.29, triggering a global ?RISK ON? move. If they don?t, then the beleaguered continental currency craters very quickly back to $1.20, from whence it came.
*The Federal Reserve Open Market Committee meets, which may finally give us the good news on QE3. If they deliver, markets will gap up. If they don?t, then everyone will assume that quantitative easing at the next meeting is a sure thing and the markets will go to sleep until then. Personally, I don?t think the Fed will act until the Dow drops below 10,000 and puts the fear of God into everyone. This is the day when we find out how real the ?Bernanke/Draghi Put? is.
*Apple releases the iPhone 5, which will become the greatest consumer electronics release in history, and possibly the most expensive. It turns that that all those leaks I was receiving about timing, price, and performance were correct. This should cause the stock to blast through $700, which is why it is my largest position, with a 35% weighting in my model portfolio. But we may not get much more action than that for the short term. The iPhone 5 launch is what the last $160 point move up since the end of May has been all about.
*The next biweekly Mad Hedge Fund Trader global strategy webinar takes place. Yikes! Whose idea was this? This timing is as bad as scheduling the Republican National Convention in Florida in the middle of the hurricane season. I may have to ask listeners to update me on prices while my broadcast is in progress, as I can?t tie up too much bandwidth with price feeds without crashing the program.
If you net out all the likely outcomes of the above, it is market positive. But surprises will have an outsized downside market impact. Whatever the case, life is about to become much more interesting.
https://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.png00DougDhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngDougD2012-09-05 01:59:412012-09-05 01:59:41I Can?t Wait Until September 12.
Following Howard Ruff for the last 35 years has always been eye opening, if not entertaining. The irascible Mormon is the publisher of Ruff Times ( http://www.rufftimes.com? ), one of the oldest investment letters in the business, and one of the original worshipers of hard assets.
The great thing about the end of the world crowd is that all of their trades are going gangbusters now and we?re all still here. Talk about a win-win! He says that any investment denominated in dollars is a mistake, which is in a long term down trend, along with all paper assets. Silver (SLV) is his first choice, which will outperform gold, and eventually top $100 from the current $27. His personal target for the barbarous relic (GLD) is $2,300, but that might prove conservative.
With the Chinese building 100 nuclear power plants over the next ten years, uranium (CCJ) has great potential. Equities may never come back from their lost decade. Don?t buy ETF?s because they are just another form of paper, and may not actually own the gold or silver they claim. The government is laying the foundation for a massive inflation, which will begin soon.
Howard has long been considered card-carrying member of the lunatic fringe of the investment world, sticking with hard assets throughout their 20 year bear market during the eighties and nineties, and annually predicting the demise of the federal government. Maybe it?s a case of a broken clock being right twice a day, but in recent years I find myself agreeing with Howard more and more. Whether that means I?m now a lunatic too, only time will tell.
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/end.jpg233319DougDhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngDougD2012-08-31 00:11:472012-08-31 00:11:47Business is Booming at Ruff Times
When I was remodeling my 160-year-old London house, the chimney was in desperate need of attention. After the bricklayer crawled up the fireplace, he found a yellowed and somewhat singed envelope addressed to Santa Claus. Thinking it was placed there by my kids, he handed it over to me. In it was a letter dated Christmas, 1910 asking for a Red Indian suit.
Europeans have long had a fascination with our Native Americans. So in preparation for my upcoming European strategy luncheon tour I thought I would get myself up to date about out earliest North American residents.
Business is booming on Indian reservations these days, or it isn?t, depending on where they live. Of the country?s 565 reservations, some 239 have moved into the casino business and the cash flow has followed. In 2010, Indian gaming reaped some $26.7 billion in revenues, or some $9,275 per indigenous native. That is a stunning 44% of America?s total casino revenues.
Some, like the Pequot tribe?s massive Foxwood operation just two hours from New York City, now the world?s largest casino, once had money raining down upon it. But the casino grew so large that it entirely occupied the diminutive Connecticut reservation allocated to it by an obscure 17th century.
During the salad days, the profits were so enormous that an annual $250,000 stipend was paid to each officially registered tribal member. A poker boom helped. No surprise that the tribe grew from 167 to 665 members during the last 30 years. Today, the operation is burdened with $2.5 billion in debt, thanks to some bad investments and an ill-timed expansion.
Casinos in more rural locations in the far west distant from population centers have fared less well. Those that contracted out for professional management from Las Vegas and Atlantic City firms, like Harrah?s, MGM, and Caesars, earn a modest living. But the reservations attempting local management on their own fall victim to inefficiencies, incompetence, corruption, over hiring of locals, and outright theft. Believe it or not, it is possible to lose money in the casino business, and some have had to shut down.
Overbuilding is another problem. It Northern New Mexico you can find several casinos within five miles of each other competing for the same customer. Most of their clients (real losers) are in fact local tribal members, the same individuals these houses are intended to help.
The 326 tribes that avoided the casino industry do so at the cost of a big hit to their standard of living. That explains why Native American median household income reaches only $35,062, compared to $50,046 for the US as a whole. Many, like the numerous Hopi, shun it because of their religion.
Without gambling there are few economic opportunities on the reservations. The parched conditions of the west limit farming. Unemployment runs as high as 80% on some reservations, such as the White Mountain Apaches. As a result, a high proportion of the country?s 2.9 million Native Americans are wards of the federal government, living on food stamps and other government handouts.
That?s not how it was supposed to be. The first modern reservation was set up for the Navajo tribe in 1851 at a baking hell hole on the Pecos River, with the intention of enforcing a primitive form of apartheid to insure their survival. Today, they are the most populous tribe, with 160,000, owning the largest reservation, at 24,000 square miles, mostly in Arizona.
Those who signed treaties early survived, which gave them status as an independent nation, but ceded all matters regarding defense to the federal government. In fact the Iroquois, Sioux, and the Chippewa separately declared war on Germany during WWII. Some even issue their own passports. Those that didn?t had to settle for much smaller reservations, or got wiped out.
In 1975, congress passed the Indian Self-Determination Act, which devolved power from the government to the tribes. Florida?s Seminole tribe won the right to open a casino in court in 1981, which was confirmed by the Supreme Court in 1987. After that, it was off to the races with Indian bingo parlors sprouting across the country.
During the 19th century Indian wars when hundreds of thousands died, the practice was to attack a wagon train, kill all the men, marry the women, and adopt the children. As a result, I am descended from three different tribes, the Delaware, Sioux, and the Cherokee, as are about a quarter of native Californians my age. So I tried to cash in on government largess by applying for tribal scholarships to go to college.
It was to no avail. Only those who can trace their lineage to a 1941Bureau of Indian Affairs census and are one eighth Native American can qualify. When whites married Indians 150 years ago, the?? common practice was to baptize them and give western names, making their origins untraceable. They were also pretty casual with marriage records in the Wild West. But we still have many of the wedding photos and know who they are.
I never did find out if that little boy got his Red Indian suit for Christmas, but I hope he did.
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/indian.jpg229321DougDhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngDougD2012-08-31 00:05:122012-08-31 00:05:12A Snapshot of America?s Native Indian Economy
Here?s a chart that you don?t see very often, the one for iron ore priced in U.S. dollars. I?m sure that every miner working at BHP?s pits in the Australian outback goes to sleep with a print out of this chart clutched close to his chest. You can?t blame him, as his livelihood depends on it, and it has had a definite southerly tilt for the last two years, losing some 50% from the top.
The reasons are known by all. As Chinese growth downshifts from a torrid 13% annual rate to 7% now and possibly zero next year, the demand for Australia?s largest export has been evaporating like an ice cube in the western deserts. (BHP) has already cancelled one high profile project. There is news of contract defaults with Chinese buyers. Steel plants in the Middle Kingdom are seeing actual shutdowns.
As this is the world?s second largest bilateral trade after America?s oil imports from the Middle East, it offers a valuable window on the health of the global economy. And the patient currently has a bad case of the flu which may develop into a fatal case of pneumonia.
Now contrast this chart with the one for the S&P 500 (SPX), which couldn?t be more different. It has been in an uptrend for the past four years, has doubled off its 2009 low, and is on the verge of drifting up to four-year highs on no volume.
What gives? What we are seeing here is a classic war between the fundamentals and liquidity, and liquidity is winning. You would think that with the rest of the world headed for, or already in, recession, the market would be going to hell in a hand basket. Not so. Ben Bernanke and his central banker friends around the world have orchestrated a crescendo of printing presses that have kept the hopium coming and stock prices rising.
This leads me back to my headline, is ?RISK ON?/?RISK OFF? broken? It would certainly seem so as long as the Federal Reserve is keeping the pedal to the metal. So paper assets, like stocks and bonds, are enjoying their glory days. At the same time, any hard assets, especially those most consumed by China, like copper, iron, ore, sugar, zinc, Caterpillar (CAT) and Freeport McMoRan (FCX), are being beaten like the proverbial red-headed stepchild.
Gold (GLD) is getting a free pass from this punishment, as quantitative easing and the dollar devaluation it assures brings in lots of buyers. Oil (USO) is going up for all the usual geopolitical reasons, including Iran, Syria, Libya, and Hurricane Isaac.
So what?s a trader to do? For a start, it means you have to work harder. Making money is no longer a simple flip of the ?ON?/?OFF? switch. We now have to carefully analyze each asset class, industrial sector, and individual company looking to buy the cheapest ones and sell short the expensive ones against them.
Remember, while people have been bitching about falling volatility and low index returns, Apple (AAPL), my largest position, has soared by 70%. It?s not like this one was hard to find either. If fact, I can see their headquarters from my office window right now, while my iMac, iPad, iPhone 4s, and Airbook are charging.
Of course, there is one way to duck the new, heavy workload, and that is to leave all the heavy lifting to me. Making money in tough conditions like this is something that I thrive on. For the first time, I have sent out more trade alerts than newsletters this month, and the model portfolio has been up almost every day for four months.
Remember, the answer to all questions is to buy my newsletter.
There is a very high degree of risk involved in trading. Past results are not indicative of future returns. MadHedgeFundTrader.com and all individuals affiliated with this site assume no responsibilities for your trading and investment results. The indicators, strategies, columns, articles and all other features are for educational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice. Information for futures trading observations are obtained from sources believed to be reliable, but we do not warrant its completeness or accuracy, or warrant any results from the use of the information. Your use of the trading observations is entirely at your own risk and it is your sole responsibility to evaluate the accuracy, completeness and usefulness of the information. You must assess the risk of any trade with your broker and make your own independent decisions regarding any securities mentioned herein. Affiliates of MadHedgeFundTrader.com may have a position or effect transactions in the securities described herein (or options thereon) and/or otherwise employ trading strategies that may be consistent or inconsistent with the provided strategies.
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