Global Market Comments
July 10, 2013
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(JULY 12 AMSTERDAM STRATEGY LUNCHEON),
(PLEASE USE MY FREE DATA BASE SEARCH),
(DRINKS WITH THE PRESIDENT)
Come join John Thomas for lunch at the Mad Hedge Fund Trader?s Global Strategy Update, which I will be conducting in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, on Friday, July 12, 2013. A three-course lunch will be followed by a PowerPoint presentation and an extended question and answer period.
I?ll be giving you my up to date view on stocks, bonds, foreign currencies, commodities, precious metals, and real estate. And to keep you in suspense, I?ll be throwing a few surprises out there too. Enough charts, tables, graphs, and statistics will be thrown at you to keep your ears ringing for a week. Tickets are available for $229.
The lunch will be held at a downtown Amsterdam hotel near Nieumarkt that will be emailed with your purchase confirmation.
I look forward to meeting you, and thank you for supporting my research. To purchase tickets for the luncheons, please go to my online store.
President Barack Obama certainly arrives at a party like a rock star. Three silver GM Suburban?s flanking an armored black Cadillac limo screech to a halt with lights flashing. All of the roads in the immediate vicinity are closed to traffic.
A dozen sunglass bedecked Secret Service agents leap out, immediately scanning the perimeter. The president bounds out and briskly walks to the plush home of a wealthy supporter.
I managed to briefly touch base with the president during his recent fund raising swing through the San Francisco Bay area. For a mere $32,000 donation to the Democratic National Committee, I received a sweaty handshake and a thank you from the former South Chicago community organizer.
It was all part of a broad swing through the Western states to rally the faithful, and to top off the DNC's coffers, which has raised a record $50 million in California this year. Perhaps Obama just wants to be among friends. While his national job approval rating languishes at 47%, it is 55% here, and an eye popping 72% among Democrats.
Since the 2008 election, some 6 million millennials, generation Y's, or echo boomers have gained the right to vote. Have you spoken to your kids lately? The only issues they care about, the environment, global warming, gay rights, and ending the war, are overwhelmingly Democratic ones. Another 4 million immigrants have also joined the voter rolls.
Sure, only 30% of these groups vote at all. But when election results swing on majorities that can be counted in the hundreds, think Florida in 2000, Ohio in 2004, and Minnesota in 2008, they could make a decisive difference.
The polls we see reported daily are only taken of participants with land lines. So they may be undercounting both cell phone addicted, texting millennials, and immigrants. How many of your kids have land lines? My bet would be none.
Now, let me throw one big unknown out there. Thanks to the Supreme Court's Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission decision, the most recent election was the first to see unlimited anonymous corporate donations since the sixties. As a result, the number of election ads disclosing donors has fallen from 97% in 2006 to 32%.
California's proposition 23 was a perfect example of what this means. Billed as the 'Save California jobs bill,' the measure was placed on the ballot and promoted by $6 million in financing from Texas base energy giant Tesoro Petroleum (TSO). And what is the company's plan to create California jobs? Suspend the state's stringent environmental regulations so it could build a new oil refinery in nearby Martinez.
In every postwar election, the party in power has lost an average 27 House seats in the midterm elections. Obama knew this the day he walked into office. That is why the most radical parts of his agenda, like health care, were front end loaded. Expect to hear much about the President's surprise, Clintonesque move to the middle, which was in fact, planned two years ago.
Yes, I know, I should stick to my day job of calling every turn in the market. But sometimes, that profession and making political prognostications become one in the same. Knowing who the next president is going to be is an immensely valuable piece of market information, as the economic philosophies of the two parties are so radically different.
Do you think the White House situation room has a ladies room?
Global Market Comments
July 9, 2013
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(JULY 16 BERLIN STRATEGY LUNCHEON),
(WHO IS BEN BERNANKE?),
(KEEP INDONESIA ON YOUR RADAR), (IDX),
(WHY WE NEED SIX NEW SAUDI ARABIA?S)
(USO), (RIG), (XOM), (OXY)
Market Vectors Indonesia Index ETF (IDX)
United States Oil (USO)
Transocean Ltd. (RIG)
Exxon Mobil Corporation (XOM)
Occidental Petroleum Corporation (OXY)
Come join John Thomas for lunch at the Mad Hedge Fund Trader?s Global Strategy Update, which I will be conducting in Berlin, Germany, at 12:00 noon on Tuesday, July 16, 2013. A three-course lunch will be followed by a PowerPoint presentation and an extended question and answer period.
I?ll be giving you my up to date view on stocks, bonds, foreign currencies, commodities, precious metals, and real estate. And to keep you in suspense, I?ll be throwing a few surprises out there too. Enough charts, tables, graphs, and statistics will be thrown at you to keep your ears ringing for a week. Tickets are available for $219.
The lunch will be held at a downtown Berlin hotel within sight of the Brandenburg Gate, the details of which will be emailed with your purchase confirmation.
I look forward to meeting you, and thank you for supporting my research. To purchase tickets for the luncheons, please go to my online store.
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 had suddenly transported itself back to the Jurassic Age, and the landscape was suddenly overrun with T-Rex?s and Brontosauri. 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 7.6%, instead of 25%.
The Fed governor is naturally a very shy and withdrawing 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 $3.6 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 let desperately needed reforms of the financial system and the rebuilding of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac slide.
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.
If you are looking for another emerging market to add to your list of things to buy on dips, then take a look at Indonesia (IDX). The world?s largest Muslim country offers a combination that I love, a population with great demographics that is also a major energy and commodities exporter.
The archipelago is the biggest country in Southeast Asia and a huge exporter of oil and LPG to Japan on long-term contracts. (An old friend of mine torched their Borneo fields at the beginning of WWII, and spent four years in a Japanese prison camp for his troubles.) Other big exports include marvelous textiles, rubber, and increasingly rare tropical hardwoods. Another plus is one of the world?s most pro growth population pyramids (see below).
The global financial crisis only knocked their growth rate from 6.1% to 4.5%, and now it is back above 6%. No doubt, $63 billion of direct foreign investment into the country helped. A series of tax reforms promise to keep the train moving, cutting the top corporate rate from 30% in 2008 to 28% in 2009, and 25% in 2010. Wisdom Tree had the ?wisdom? to launch the country?s first ETF (IDX) in January, 2009 (what timing!), which became one of the best performers of the year, rocketing over 300% from the lows to $60.
Islamic inspired terrorism is still a lingering concern. I keep Indonesia in the category of highly volatile, high risk, high return frontier markets that you only want to buy on a big dip. Keep it on your radar.
Meet Your New Investors in Indonesia
I recently spent an evening with Ambassador Richard Jones, the Deputy Executive Director of the International Energy Agency in Paris, who had some eye opening things to say about the energy space. The IEA was first set up as a counterweight to OPEC during the oil crisis in 1974, and has since evolved into a top-drawer energy research organization.
World GDP will grow an average 3.1%/year through 2030, driving oil demand from the current 84 million barrels/day to 103 million b/d. That means we will have to find the equivalent of six Saudi Arabia?s to fill the gap or prices are going up, possibly a lot. His conservative target has crude at $190 in twenty years. Some 39% of that increase in demand will come from China and 15% from India.
A collapse in investment caused by the financial crisis means that supply can?t recover in time to avoid another price spike. More than 1.5 billion people today don?t have electricity at all, but would love to have it. The best the climate negotiations can hope for is for CO2 to rise until 2020, and then plateau after that, because once this greenhouse gas enters the atmosphere it is very hard to get out.
This will require a massive decarbonization effort reliant on nuclear, hydro, alternatives, and carbon capture and storage. Up to half of the needed carbon reduction can be achieved through simple efficiency measures, like ditching the incandescent light bulb, driving more hybrids, and closing dirty, old coal fired power plants. Natural gas will be a vital bridge, as it is cheap, in abundant supply, and emits only half the carbon of traditional fossil fuels. The total 20-year bill for the rebuilding of our new energy infrastructure will exceed $10 trillion.
Richard, who comes from a long diplomatic career in Kuwait, Kazakhstan, and Israel, certainly didn?t pull any punches. I have been a huge fan of the IEA?s data for 35 years. Better use any weakness in oil prices to accumulate long term positions in crude through the futures, the ETF (USO), the offshore drilling companies like Transocean (RIG), and oil and gas plays like ExxonMobil (XOM)? and Occidental Petroleum (OXY). When oil comes back, it will do so with a vengeance.
I?ll Take Another Six Please
Global Market Comments
July 8, 2013
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(JULY 19 FRANKFURT STRATEGY LUNCHEON),
(THE TWO CENTURY DOLLAR SHORT),
(UUP), (FXY), (FXE), (FXB), (FXC), (FXA), (BNZ), (CYB)
(CNN?S JOHN LEWIS; THE DEATH OF A COLLEAGUE)
PowerShares DB US Dollar Index Bullish (UUP)
CurrencyShares Japanese Yen Trust (FXY)
CurrencyShares Euro Trust (FXE)
CurrencyShares British Pound Sterling Tr (FXB)
CurrencyShares Canadian Dollar Trust (FXC)
CurrencyShares Australian Dollar Trust (FXA)
WisdomTree Dreyfus New Zealand Dollar (BNZ)
WisdomTree Chinese Yuan (CYB)
Come join me for lunch for the Mad Hedge Fund Trader?s Global Strategy Update, which I will be conducting in Frankfurt, Germany on Friday, July 19, 2013. A three-course lunch will be followed by a PowerPoint presentation and an extended question and answer period.
I?ll be giving you my up to date view on stocks, bonds, foreign currencies, commodities, precious metals, and real estate. And to keep you in suspense, I?ll be throwing a few surprises out there too. Enough charts, tables, graphs, and statistics will be thrown at you to keep your ears ringing for a week. Tickets are available for $239.
I?ll be arriving an hour early and leaving late in case anyone wants to have a one on one discussion, or just sit around and chew the fat about the financial markets.
The lunch will be held at a prestigious private club not far for the Botanical Gardens, the details of which will be emailed to you with your purchase confirmation.
I look forward to meeting you, and thank you for supporting my research. To purchase tickets for the luncheons, please go to my online store.
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