I am pleased to announce that I will be participating in the Invest like a Monster Trading Conference in San Francisco during October 25-26. The two-day event brings together experts from across the financial landscape that will improve your understanding of markets by a quantum leap and measurably boost your own personal trading performance.

Tickets are available for a bargain $399. If you buy the premium $499 package you will be invited to the Friday 6:00 pm VIP cocktail reception, where you will meet luminaries from the trading world, such as tradeMONSTRS?s Jon and Pete Najarian, Guy Adami, Jeff Mackey, and of course, myself, John Thomas, the Mad Hedge Fund Trader. All in all, it is great value for money, and I?ll personally throw in a ride on the City by the Bay?s storied cable cars for free.

Jon Najarian is the founder of optionMonster, which offers clients a series of custom crafted computer algorithms that give a crucial edge when trading the market. Called Heat Seeker ?, it monitors no less than 180,000 trades a second to give an early warning of large trades that are about to hit the stock, options, and futures markets.

To give you an idea of how much data this is, think of downloading the entire contents of the Library of Congress, about 20 terabytes of data, every 30 minutes. His firm maintains a 10 gigabyte per second conduit that transfers data at 6,000 times the speed of a T-1 line, the fastest such pipe in the civilian world. Jon?s team then distills this ocean of data on his website into the top movers of the day. ?As with the NFL,? says Jon, ?you can?t defend against speed.?

The system catches big hedge funds, pension funds, and mutual funds shifting large positions, giving subscribers a peak at the bullish or bearish tilt of the market. It also offers accurate predictions of imminent moves in single stock and index volatility.

Jon started his career as a linebacker for the Chicago Bears, and I can personally attest that he still has a handshake that?s like a steel vice grip. Maybe it was his brute strength that enabled him to work as a pit trader on the Chicago Board of Options Exchange for 22 years, where he was known by his floor call letters of ?DRJ.? He formed Mercury Trading in 1989 and then sold it to the mega hedge fund, Citadel, in 2004.

Jon developed his patented algorithms for Heat Seeker? with his brother Pete, another NFL player (Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Minnesota Vikings), who like Jon, is a regular face in the financial media.

In order to register for the conference, please click here. There you will find the conference agenda, bios of the speakers, and a picture of my own ugly mug. I look forward to seeing you there.

Cling! Cling!

Jon Najarian

Pack your portfolios with agricultural plays like Potash (POT), Mosaic (MOS), and Agrium (AGU) if Dr. Paul Ehrlich is just partially right about the impending collapse in the world?s food supply. You might even throw in long positions in wheat, corn, soybeans, and rice.

The never dull and often controversial Stanford biology professor told me he expects that global warming is leading to significant changes in world weather patterns that will cause droughts in some of the largest food producing areas, causing massive famines. Food prices will skyrocket, and billions could die. At greatest risk are the big rice producing areas in South Asia, which depend on glacial run off from the Himalayas. If the glaciers melt, this will be gone.

California faces a similar problem if the Sierra snowpack disappears. Rising sea levels displacing 500 million people in low-lying coastal areas is another big problem. One of the 77-year-old professor?s early books ?The Population Bomb? was required reading for me in college in 1970, and I used to drive up from Los Angeles to hear his lectures (followed by the obligatory side trip to the Haight-Ashbury).

Other big risks to the economy are the threat of a third world nuclear war caused by population pressures, and global plagues facilitated by a widespread growth of intercontinental transportation and globalization. And I won?t get into the threat of a giant solar flare frying our electrical grid. ?Super consumption? in the US needs to be reined in where the population is growing the fastest.

If the world adopts an American standard of living, we need four more Earths to supply the needed natural resources. We need to raise the price of all forms of carbon, preferably through taxes, but cap and trade will work too. Population control is the answer to all of these problems, which is best achieved by giving women an education, jobs, and rights, and has already worked well in Europe and Japan.

All sobering food for thought.

Those of you counting on getting your old union assembly line job back in Detroit can forget it.

The eight year forecast published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that 4.19 million jobs will be gained in the US in professional and business services, followed by 4 million health care and social assistance jobs, while 1.2 million will be lost in manufacturing.

This is great news for website designers, internet entrepreneurs, registered nurses, and masseuses in California, but grim tidings for traditional metal bashers in the rust belt manufacturing states like Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio.

I?m so old now that I am no longer asked for a driver?s license to get into a nightclub. Instead, they ask for a carbon dating. The real challenge for we aged career advisors is that probably half of these new service jobs haven?t even been invented yet, and if they can be described, it is only in a cheesy science fiction paperback with a half-dressed blond on the front cover. After all, who heard of a webmaster, a cell phone contract sales person, or a blogger 40 years ago?

Where are all these jobs going? You guessed it, China, which by my calculation, has imported 25 million jobs from the US over the past decade. You can also blame other lower waged, upstream manufacturing countries like Vietnam, where the Middle Kingdom is increasingly subcontracting its own offshoring.

These forecasts may be optimistic, because they assume that Americans can continue to claw their way up the value chain in the global economy, and not get stuck along the way, as the Japanese did in the nineties. The US desperately needs no less than 27 million new jobs to soak up natural population and immigration growth and get us back to a traditional 5% unemployment rate. The only way that is going to happen is for America to invent something new and big, and fast.

Personal computers achieved this during the eighties, and the internet did the trick in the nineties. The fact that we?ve done didly squat since 2000 except create a giant paper chase of subprime loans and derivatives explains why job growth since then has been zero, real wage growth has been negative, and American standards of living are falling.

Alternative energy and biotechnology are two possible drivers for a new economy. Unfortunately, the last administration did everything it could to stymie progress in both these fields, coddling big oil so China could steal a lead in several alternative technologies, and starving stem cell researchers of federal cash, ceding the lead there to others.

While the current crop of politicians extol the virtues of education, the reality is that we are dumbing down our public education system. How do we invent the next ?new? thing, while shrinking the University of California?s budget by 20% two years in a row? If my local high school can?t afford new computers, how is it going to feed Silicon Valley with computer literate work force? The US has a ?Michael Jackson? economy. It?s still living like a rock star, but hasn?t had a hit in 20 years.

China can have all the $20 a day jobs it wants. But if it accelerates its move up the value chain, as it clearly aspires to do, then America is in for even harder times. I?ll be hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst. How do you say ?unemployment check? in Mandarin?