Featured Trades: (MY RUN IN WITH THE LAW)

3) My Run in With the Law. I'm sorry I'm late getting my letter out today. I was racing home from San Francisco on Highway 24 when the California Highway Patrol pulled me over for doing 80 mph in a 65 mph zone.

The officer asked me where the fire was, and I told him I was rushing back to my office to get my investment newsletter out. He asked if this was like a stock market letter, and when I said yes, he informed me that in addition to speeding, I would be cited for a pink taillight.

I pointed out that several pension funds relied on my letter for direction and that the sooner they got it, the better their performance would be. The officer then asked if CALPERS, the California Public Employees Retirement System, was one of those. When I confirmed this, he told me that this was his pension fund, that it had lost a third of its value in the last two years, and tacked on a third violation for excessive smoke belching out of my tail pipe.

I upped the ante by informing him that a lot of home owners read my letter for real estate advice. The cop sighed that his own house had dropped in value by half, and hit me again for using my cell phone while driving, a $148 fine.

Then I noticed a Marine Corp. gunnery sergeant's pin on his uniform. I casually mentioned that I had been a jarhead captain and was a combat pilot in Desert Storm. He murmured under his breath that he hated all officers, and then noticed the life sized blow up Barbie Doll sitting in my passenger seat that I used to gain access to the carpool lane.

As he handed me my fifth citation for illegal use of a commuter lane, a minimum $340 fine, I decided to keep my mouth shut. Who knew we financial types were so unpopular on Main Street? Looks like the next time I need to rush back from the city, I'll be riding my bicycle.

Featured Trades: (AAPL), (STEVE JOBS)

2) Apple's next stop: $1,000. When I took a young, cocky, long haired, Levis wearing Steve Jobs around to meet Morgan Stanley's institutional investors to pitch an Apple share offering 28 years ago, I vowed never to buy anything from the man. He was such a great salesman, and possessed such a messianic devotion to his product, the risk of getting legged over had to be great.

This proved a good strategy for the next 18 years, when the company nearly went under three times, and the stock repeatedly plunged from its initial listing price of $22 down to $4. Disastrous products like the Apple Newton came and went, and then poor Steve got fired.

Living in the San Francisco Bay Area, I was also creeped out by the fanatical cult following that Steve enjoys. Criticize an Apple product here, and you risk getting attacked, ostracized, deleted from address books, and chopped off Christmas card lists. There was also no end of abuse from my IPod and Imac addicted kids.

I have to confess now that my prior prejudices caused me to miss the boat on Apple for the last decade, when the stock soared from $4 to $275, eventually topping Microsoft (MSFT) with a nearly $300 billion market capitalization. To see the company bring out a ground breaking, high end $499-$829 product like the IPad and sell 2 million units in a short two months during appalling economic conditions is nothing less than amazing. The recent stock performance has also been miraculous, bouncing back from a flash crash low of $195 to challenge its old high in a matter of weeks.

Forecasts for the global smart phone market are ratcheting up by the day on the back of surging demand from emerging markets. Sales could reach 250 million units annually by 2012, of which 17% currently is sold by Apple. The company has become a monster cash flow generator, spewing out $12 billion over the last 12 months. It sits on a cash mountain of $23 billion, or $45/share. Apple now has the envious problem in that sales of several of its products are going hyperbolic at the same time.

Some analysts have Apple's earnings skyrocketing from the current $12/share to $30 over the next two years, which at the current 22 multiple would take the share price up to $675. If the company's multiple expands to its pre crash average of 35 X, that would take the stock to a positively nose bleeding $1,073, giving it a 400% return over the next two years.

I'm not saying that you should rush out and load up on stock today. But it might be worth taking a stake on the next wave of fear that strikes the market.

To prove that I am not the world's worst Apple analyst, let me tell you about Ron Wayne, who owned 10% of Apple (AAPL) and you sold it for $800 in 1976. What would that stake be worth today? Try $22 billion.

That is the harsh reality that Ron Wayne, 76, faces every morning when he wakes up, one of the three original founders of the consumer electronics giant. Ron first met Steve Jobs when he was a spritely 21 year old marketing guy at Atari, the inventor of the hugely successful 'Pong' video arcade game. Ron dumped his shares when he became convinced that Steve Jobs' reckless spending was going to drive the nascent start up into the ground, and he wanted to protect his assets in a future bankruptcy.

Co-founders Jobs and Steve Wozniak kept their original 45% ownership. Today Job's 0.5% ownership is worth $1.5 billion, while the Woz's share remains undisclosed.

Ron designed the company's original logo and wrote the manual for the Apple 1 computer, which boasted all of 8,000 bytes of RAM (which is 0.008 megabytes to you non-techies). Today, Ron is living off of a meager monthly social security check in remote Pahrump, Nevada, about as far out in the middle of nowhere you can get, where he can occasionally be seen playing the penny slots.

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What a Long and Windy Road It's Been

SPECIAL ENERGY ISSUE

Featured Trades: (OXY), (BP), (OIL)

1) Take a Look at Occidental Petroleum (OXY). As a follow up to my trade alert for Macro Millionaires to buy the double leveraged oil major ETF (DIG), I thought you'd like to know what my second choice was. There are a lot of belles at the ball, but you can't dance with all of them.

While a student at UCLA in the early seventies, I took a World Politics course which required me to pick a country, analyze its economy, and make recommendations for its economic development. I chose Algeria, a country where I had spent the summer of 1968 caravanning among the Bedouins, crawling out of the desert half starved, lice ridden, and half dead.? I concluded that the North African country should immediately nationalize the oil industry, and raise prices from $3/barrel to $10.? I knew that Los Angeles based Occidental Petroleum (OXY) was interested in exploring for oil there, so I sent my paper to the company for review. They called the next day and invited me to their imposing downtown headquarters, then the tallest building in Los Angeles.

I was ushered into the office of Dr. Armand Hammer, one of the great independent oil moguls of the day, a larger than life figure who owned a spectacular impressionist art collection, and who confidently displayed a priceless Faberg?? egg on his desk. He said he was impressed with my paper, and then spent two hours grilling me. Why should oil prices go up? Who did I know there? What did I see? What was the state of their infrastructure? Roads? Bridges? Rail lines? Did I see any oil derricks? Did I see any Russians? I told him everything I knew, including the two weeks in an Algiers jail for taking pictures in the wrong places. His parting advice was to never take my eye off the oil industry, as it is the driver of everything else. I have followed that advice ever since.

When I went back to UCLA, I told a CIA friend of mine that I had just spent the afternoon with the eminent doctor (Marsha, call me!). She told me that he had been a close advisor of Vladimir Lenin after the Russian Revolution, had been a double agent for the Soviets ever since, that the FBI had known this all along, and was currently funneling illegal campaign donations to President Richard Nixon. Shocked, I kicked myself for going into an interview so ill prepared, and had missed a golden opportunity to ask some great questions. I never made that mistake again.

Some 40 years later, while trolling the markets for great buying opportunities set up by the BP oil spill, I stumbled across (OXY) once more (click here for their site at http://www.oxy.com/ ). (OXY) has a minimal offshore presence, nothing in deep water, and huge operations in the Middle East and South America. It was the first US oil company to go back into Libya when the sanctions were lifted in 2005. (OXY's) substantial California production is expected to leap to 45% to 200,000 barrels a day over the next four years. Its horizontal multistage fracturing technology will enable it to dominate California shale. It has raised its dividend for the eighth year in a row, by 15% to 1.60%. Need I say more?

The clear message that has come out of the BP oil spill is that onshore energy resources are now more valuable than offshore ones. I decided to add it to my model portfolio. Energy is one of a tiny handful of industries I am willing to put my money in these days (technology and commodities are the others), and BP has handed me a rare opportunity to get in as the tightwad that I truly am.

Oh, and I got an A+ on the paper, and the following year Algeria raised the price of oil to $12.

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A Faberge Egg

Featured Trades: (CISCO SYSTEMS), (CSCO)

3) A Nice Update on Cisco Systems. For those of you who caught my trade alert to buy the Cisco Systems (CSCO) $20-$22 bull call spread last week and where hoping to get it at lower prices can forget about it. I spoke to an analyst today whose outlook for the networking giant was even more optimistic than mine.

The company has announced an incredibly aggressive buy back program that will soak up 17% of its outstanding shares on any further dip in prices. Cash on the balance sheet has ballooned from $38 billion last year to a staggering $45 billion today. Its fundamental business is rock solid, which it has successfully moated against any potential competitor. All of the mega trends currently in play in the online world, like cloud computing and the upgrade to video streaming, play directly into Cisco's hands. The income statement and cash flow couldn't be healthier.

He believes that the current 30% dip from the April high was purely sentiment driven and creates the buying opportunity of a lifetime. According to his estimates, CSCO is currently selling at 12 times next year's earnings. Get a multiple expansion on the upside, and you could see the shares rocket from today's $19.55 to as high as $28 in the foreseeable future. If for some reason you are unable to employ the options strategy here, the outright stock is a huge buy here.

Just thought you'd like to know.

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Cisco is Looking Impenetrable

Featured Trades: (SPY), (EWJ)
Japan iShares ETF

2) Why I'm Avoiding Japan Like the Plague. Now look at the world's worst population pyramid, that for Japan (EWJ). These three graphs show that a nearly perfect pyramid drove a miracle stock market during the fifties and sixties which I remember well, when Japan had your textbook high growth emerging market economy. That changed dramatically when the population started to age rapidly during the nineties. The 2007 graph is shouting at you not to go near the Land of the Rising Sun, and the 2050 projection tells you why.

By then, a small young population of consumers with a very low birth rate will be supporting the backbreaking burden of a huge population of old age pensioners. Every wage earner will be supporting one retiree. Think low GDP growth, huge government borrowing, deflation, collapsing bond markets, a depreciating yen, and terrible stock and housing markets. If you are wondering why I believe that a short position in the yen should be a core position in any portfolio for the next decade, this is a big reason. Dodge the bullet. Enjoy their food and hot tubs, but not their stocks.

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