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.
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Berlin-Brandenburg-Gate.jpg268356Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2013-07-02 01:05:512013-07-02 01:05:51July 16 Berlin Strategy Luncheon
If you forgot to buy your loved one a birthday present and spent a week sleeping on the sofa, eating canned food, and cleaning out the cat box, you now have a chance to redeem yourself.
A revolutionary new website exists called Mazal Diamond, which promises to turn the online jewelry business upside down. I went to the privately held company?s website at http://www.mazaldiamond.com and found an entertaining assortment of free tools. You can design your own jewelry, and even order a custom cut, which Mazal will supply out of their massive 100,000 stone inventory. You can also figure out if the jeweler down the street is trying to rip you off.
Just for fun, I appraised the diamond I bought for my late wife, which I bought from a Hasidic Jew in an alley off of Manhattan?s West 47th street. He kept his inventory hidden in an envelope in his sock. How times have changed! The two carat, VVS1, round cut, yellow diamond that I paid $3,000 for in 1977, would fetch $39,800 today. Great trade!
Mazal Diamond?s game changing advantage is that they cut, design, and manufacture their own jewelry, enabling them to undercut prices offered by established industry leaders. In fact, the $30 billion a year diamond industry is undergoing radical change by moving online, much the same way as the book, music, and travel industry have gone. Your local neighborhood jewelry store is about to get wiped out, or become a quaint relic.
Blue Nile (NILE) pioneered the way, and instantly became the 800-pound gorilla. The company cut costs by keeping inventories low, relying instead on a secretive web of anonymous suppliers. Now, second generation entrants are snapping at its heels and eating its lunch with polished websites, better service, and lower prices, seducing potential customers with free diamond blogs. Mazal Diamond even offers a year of free insurance.
They are getting a boost from a 30% price gain, a woman?s best friend has seen since the March, 2009 stock market bottom, taking them back to pre crash levels. The US accounts for about half the world market, so the new frugality will be a challenge. That will be offset by flight to safety purchases by inflation wary Americans, and new demand from the emerging market middle class.
Investment grade diamonds have been steady earners, gaining an average 5% a year over the last three decades. To avoid another week on the sofa, you might even think about buying next year?s Valentine?s surprise early.
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/ring.jpg240240Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2013-07-02 01:04:152013-07-02 01:04:15Diamonds Are Still an Investor?s Best Friend
Hey! You there, staring at this monitor. This is your PC talking to you. No, not you over there standing in the background. I?m talking to the guy sitting in front of me poking at my keys. Ouch! That one hurt!
So you thought no one was watching, did you? Let me set you straight. About a month ago you clicked on a certain website, and I installed myself as a cookie on your computer, which is an innocuous little text file that you can?t see. Since then, I have been tracking your every move, recording websites you clicked on, the pages you visited, and the stuff you ordered. I then used this handy little algorithm to build a profile of exactly who you are. I now know you better than your own mother. In fact, I know you better than you know yourself.
For example, I am aware that you make more than $250,000 a year, live in a posh zip code in San Francisco, belong to a fancy country club, and drive a Mercedes. You donate to Republican political causes, send your kids to a prestigious private school, and bill it all to an American Express Platinum Card. Did I leave anything out?
Because I know every detail of your life, down to your inside leg measurement, I am able to harness the power of this machine to more precisely service your every need. That includes directing advertising to you, which you have a high probability of clicking on. The more you click on my ads, the higher prices I can realize for those ads. The ad campaigns you now see are unique to your own personal computer because they are tied to your IP address. My program, called ?behavioral targeting? is the next ?big thing? in online advertising. It?s all part of the brave new world.
I see you have been shopping for a new car. Check out the new Hyundai at http://www.hyundaiusa.com/, which offers the same quality as your existing ride, at half the price. Your clicks this morning suggest you?re taking your ?significant other? out to dinner tonight. Might I suggest Gary Danko?s on Bay Street at http://www.garydanko.com/site/bio.html ? The rack of lamb is to die for there.
Your visits to Travelocity and Expedia tell me you?re planning a vacation. I bet you didn?t know you can find incredible deals in Las Vegas at http://www.visitlasvegas.com/vegas/index.jsp . Thinking about buying a condo there? They?ll even pay for the trip if you promise to check one out while you?re there.
Since we?re chatting here mano a mano, I noticed that that last pair of jeans you ordered from http://us.levi.com/home/index.jsp had a 42-inch waist, up from the 40?s in your last order. Better lay off those cheeseburgers. Pretty soon, they?ll be calling you ?tubby? or ?fatso?. Better visit http://www.weightwatchers.com/Index.aspx soon, or the legs on that chair might buckle out from under you.
Worried about privacy? Privacy, shmivacy. There hasn?t been privacy in this country since the first social security number was handed out in 1936. And don?t expect any relief from Congress. I doubt half those dummies even know how to turn on their own PC?s.
Don?t even think about trying to delete me. I?m a ?flash cookie?, an insidious little piece of code that reinstalls every time you try that. Think of me as a toenail fungus. Once you catch me, I?m almost impossible to get rid of.
I hope you don?t mind, but I?ve been passing your personal details around to some of my buddies at other websites. That?s why when you clicked on http://www.nfl.com/ you got deluged with product offers from your local team, the San Francisco 49ers. I?ve got friends at Google, Facebook, MySpace, and pretty much everywhere. Can I help it if I?m a popular guy? I bet the view from those 50-yard seats is great, isn?t it?
I noticed that your spending habits don?t exactly match with the income you reported on your last tax return. Do you think the IRS would like to know about that? I bet you didn?t know the agency offers a 10% reward for turning in tax cheats.
How about those triple XXX DVD?s you bought last week? Whoa! Hot, hot, hot! I hope your employer never finds out about those. It might not go down too well at your next performance review.
I thought it was lovely that you bought your spouse a two carat, yellow, vvs1, round cut diamond ring for $26,000 from http://www.bluenile.com/ for your 30th wedding anniversary. But who is Lolita, the Argentine firecracker, in Miami Beach? Does the old wifey know you sent her a $2,000 pair of diamond stud earrings? What?s it worth to you for me to keep mum on this? Maybe you should take a quick peak at? 3StepDivorce.com at http://www.3stepdivorce.com? and see what you?re in for?
Naw, I?m just pulling your leg. This is all just between friends, right? Think of it as a doctor/patient relationship. I?ll tell you what. See that leaderboard ad at the top of the page? Just click on that and we?ll call it even. Oooh that felt good! Click it again. Oh, baby! Not too many times. You?ll trigger my anti click fraud program.
Now you see that wide skyscraper add over on the right? Click on that too. Oh baby! Click it again! And there?s a little button ad at the bottom of the page. No, not that one. A little lower. What was that little cutie?s name in Miami again? Aaaaah.
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Computer.jpg295406Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2013-07-02 01:03:202013-07-02 01:03:20So You Think They?re Not Watching Your PC?
Featured Trade:
(MAD DAY TRADER IS NOW FOR SALE),
(AUGUST 1 MYKONOS, GREECE STRATEGY LUNCHEON), (BE CAREFUL WHO YOU SNITCH ON),
(COULD YOU QUALIFY TO BECOME A US CITIZEN?)
https://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.png00Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2013-07-01 01:07:292013-07-01 01:07:29July 1, 2013
I am pleased to announce that the The Mad Day Trader is now for sale, my first major upgradeto your service.
While the Global Trading Dispatch focuses on investment over a one week to six-month time frame, Mad Day Trader will exploit money-making opportunities over a ten minute to three day window. It is ideally suited for day traders, but can also be used by long-term investors to improve market timing for entry and exit points.
Mad Day Trader uses a dozen proprietary short-term technical and momentum indicators to generate buy and sell signals. These will be sent to you by text message and email for immediate execution. During normal trading conditions, you should receive three to five alerts a day.
As with our existing service, you will receive ticker symbols, entry and exit points, targets, stop losses, and regular real time updates. At the end of each day, a separate short-term model portfolio will be sent to you and posted on the website.
The new service will generate long and short selling signals for a range of widely traded exchange traded funds (ETF?s). These include stock indexes (SPY), bonds (TLT), (TBT), foreign exchange (FXY), (FXE), (FXA), commodities (CU), (CORN), energy (USO), (UNG), and precious metals (GLD), (SLV). There is also a special focus on the leading hot stocks of the day. This will be followed up with a series of educational webinars that will be an important resource for the serious trader.
The Mad Day Trader service will be provided out of Chicago by my old friend and industry veteran, Jim Parker. Jim is a 40-year veteran of the financial markets and has long made a living as an independent trader in the pits at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
Jim has worked his way up from a junior floor runner to advisor to some of the world?s largest hedge funds. We are lucky to have him on our team and gain access to his experience, knowledge, and expertise. You will not find a better man in Chicago to look after your positions.
I have been following his alerts for the past five years, and his impeccable market timing has become an important part of the ?unfair advantage? that I provide readers. The time has finally come to offer Mad Day Trader as a stand-alone product.
A trading service with this degree of success and sophistication normally costs $20,000 a year. As a client of The Mad Hedge Fund Trader, you can purchase Mad Day Trader alone for $2,000 a year or $699 a quarter. Or you can buy it as a package together with Global Trading Dispatch, which we call Global Trading Dispatch PRO, for $4,000 a year, a 20% discount to the full retail price.
Existing subscribers to the Global Trading Dispatch are invited to upgrade their subscription to include both products. Just send an email to Nancy at customer support at support@madhedgefundtrader.com.
She will calculate the remaining value of your current subscription and give you a full credit towards the new one-year Global Trading Dispatch PRO subscription. She will then send you instructions on where to send a check. As no two amounts will be the same, our store is unable to handle personalized orders.
Part of the deal is that I want to hear from you on how we can evolve Mad Day Trader to make it more user friendly and coherent to better meet your needs. Sometimes, a couple of old warhorses like us forget how much our specialized language is incomprehensible to the outside world. Just send us an email with suggestions to support@madhedgefundtrader.com.
00Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2013-07-01 01:06:322013-07-01 01:06:32Mad Day Trader is Now for Sale!
Come join John Thomas for lunch at the Mad Hedge Fund Trader?s Global Strategy Update, which I will be conducting on the Greek island of Mykonos in the Aegean Sea on Thursday, August 1, 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 $259.
The lunch will be held at major resort hotel on the south shore of the island, which can be found by steering a course of 120 degrees 99 nautical miles from the port of Piraeus. Just make sure you don?t run aground on the island of Andros on the way, as the tides can be treacherous. The pirates on Mykonos have already been dealt with. Moorings can be made available for private visiting yachts offshore. I will email more details with your purchase confirmation.
Bring your broad brimmed hat, sunglasses, and plenty of SPF 50 suntan lotion. You will need them. The Greek islands are cooking hot this time of the year. The dress is casual. Those not wishing to view the clothing optional beach can have a chair with its back to the sea. Accompanying spouses and significant others will be free to bill drinks to my personal account as my guest. Together we will plot the future of western civilization.
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.
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Mykonos.jpg342397Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2013-07-01 01:05:532013-07-01 01:05:53August 1 Mykonos, Greece Strategy Luncheon
Buried in the recently passed Dodd-Frank financial reform bill are massive financial rewards for turning in your boss. The SEC is hoping that multimillion dollar rewards amounting to 10%-30% of sanction amounts will drive a stampede of whistle-blowers to their doors with evidence of malfeasance and fraud by their employers.
If such rules were in place at the time of the settlement with Goldman Sachs (GS), the bonus, in theory, could have been worth up to $500 million. Wall Street firms are bracing themselves for an onslaught of claims, legitimate and otherwise, by droves of hungry gold diggers looking for an early retirement.
Don?t count on this as a get rich quick scheme. Government hurdles to meet the requirement of a true stoolie can be daunting. The standard of evidence demanded is high, and must be matched with the violation of specific federal laws. Idle chit chat at the water cooler won?t do. Litigation can stretch out over five years, involve substantial legal costs, and often lead to a non-financial settlement with no reward.
Having ?rat? on your resume doesn?t exactly look good either. Just ask Sherron Watkins, the in house CPA who turned in energy giant Enron?s Ken Lay, Andy Fastow, and Jeffrey Skilling just before it crashed in flames. Nearly a decade later, Sherron earns a modest living on the lecture circuit warning of the risks of false accounting, and whistle-blowing.
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Sherron-Watkins.jpg255331Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2013-07-01 01:04:042013-07-01 01:04:04Be Careful Who You Snitch On
The coming Fourth of July celebration brings back memories of my late wife?s campaign to become an American citizen, who originally came from Japan.
Part of the process required a verbal quiz about US history and government. Our family spent a year energetically prepping her, with nightly grilling?s over dinner about the most obscure details of our independent form of government. She took cram courses and read a dozen prep books. By the time the test day came, she was a veritable constitutional law scholar, and any one of us could have qualified for a seat on the Supreme Court.
I drove her up to the Federal Building in Santa Rosa, California with the greatest trepidation. As the interviewing officer entered, the tension in the room was so thick, you could cut it with a knife. There were only three questions. No. 1: what colors are in the American flag (answer: red, white, and blue). No. 2: who was the first general of the US army? (Answer: George Washington). What are the three branches of government? (Answer: legislative, executive, and judicial).
I was stunned. All that work and she gets a test that a child could pass. Two months later we were in an auditorium on San Francisco?s posh Nob Hill with 1,500 others to be sworn in, which by tradition is led by an English applicant.
In 2008, the feds revamped the test to make it a little harder. Here are some sample questions. No. 1: who wrote the Articles of Confederation? (Answer: Alexander Hamilton). No 2: how many seats are in the House of Representatives? (Answer: 435 voting, six nonvoting). No. 3: How many amendments are there to the Constitution? (27)
Whoa! I?m not sure I could pass this test. Just as my SAT scores are probably too low to get into a decent school today, I?m not sure that I could meet the standard to become a citizen either. But over one million immigrants did last year.
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Swearing-In-Citizen.jpg319452Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2013-07-01 01:03:542013-07-01 01:03:54Could You Qualify to Become a US Citizen?
My tux and white dinner jacket are packed, the hotels are booked, and the limo is waiting outside. The Cessna is fully fueled and the flight plan filed. I am taking off for my annual European Strategy Luncheon Tour.
Along the way I will be meeting with other hedge fund managers, senior government officials, CEO?s at major banks and Fortune 500 companies, large institutional investors, and a Nobel Prize winner or two. Getting out into the real world and soaking up new data and opinions in invaluable in shaping my own global view, and your performance benefits from it. Since I don?t stumble across these people in my living room, I have to seek them out.
After pit stops in Chicago and New York, I?ll board the Cunard Line?s Queen May II at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal to take residence in the owner?s suite. As we pass over the wreck of the Titanic on the second day out, we?ll throw a bouquet of flowers as a mark of respect.
In London I?ll catch William Shakespeare?s A Midsummer Night?s Dream at the Globe Theater, spend an evening at the Royal Ballet, and visit the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition. At least one morning will find me catching an old-fashioned straight razor shave at the Jermyn Street Barbers, and topping up my supply of business shirts at Turnbull & Asser.
The cheese trolley at the Michelin restaurant is to die for. For accommodations I?ll be staying at the ever reliable, if not Spartan, British Navy Officers Club. You know, the place where Horatio Nelson used to drink with his junior officers?
I?ll then board the Orient Express for Venice, where the dinner is black tie only. Hopefully, there won?t be any murders this time. If a new Brioni suit and pair of Gucci shoes throw themselves upon me while I stroll through the Galleria in Milan I may be unable to resist.
In Geneva I?ll be consulting with the representatives of several Middle Eastern royal families while they vacation in the Alps. One afternoon will be devoted to taking the paddle wheel steamer on Lake Geneva to the Chateau de Chillon in Montreux where Lord Byron used to live, sipping fine Swiss white wines along the way.
The grand finale will be my annual assault on the Matterhorn at Zermatt, which at 14,692 feet, is higher than anything we have in the continental US. After training all year for this, it?s now or never. I spend my evenings there at public steam baths where, afterwards, I roll around in the snow and beat myself with birch branches. It is invigorating, to say the least.
I will be traveling with my laptop and keeping touch with the markets. While 18th century Internet service is passable, the bandwidth can be snail like. So unless I see something extraordinary, I will cut back on new Trade Alerts. After running up a 36% return in six months, and beating 99% of the hedge funds in the industry, I deserve a break. I need to spend some time alone on a mountaintop, communing with the spirits, attempting to discover the new long-term market trends through the mist.
While on the road, I will continue writing my newsletter, giving you my daily dose of market insight. I will also be re-running some of my favorite research pieces from the past. This is to expose my thousands on new subscribers to the golden oldies, and to remind the legacy readers who have since forgotten them. I will be back in San Francisco in mid August, glued to my screens once again for another year of toil. In the meantime, please feel free to email me.
Mad Day Trader, Jim Parker, will be putting the pedal to the metal to get his new product off the ground, and will be working straight through the summer.
In the meantime, I shall be raising a glass to all of you at dinner, the loyal readers of The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader. Salute! Prost! And Cheers! Thanks for making this letter a huge success!
If you want to take the opportunity to meet me in person, please find my strategy luncheon schedule below. To purchase tickets for the luncheons, please go to my online store at http://madhedgefundradio.com/ and click on ?STRATEGY LUNCHEONS?, and the city of your choice.
New York City -July 2
London, England -July 8
Amsterdam, Netherlands -July 12
Berlin, Germany -July 16
Frankfurt, Germany -July 19
Portofino, Italy -July 25
Mykonos, Greece - August 1
Zermatt, Switzerland - August 9
I?ll Meet You on Top
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Zermatt.jpg351468Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2013-06-28 01:02:352013-06-28 01:02:35Taking Off for Europe
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