There are two types of trading accounts permitted by Australian financial regulators:

Cash Accounts ? opened by individuals
Regulation ?T? accounts -? opened by corporations and trusts

Reg ?T? accounts have no problems executing any of my Trade Alerts, including those for stocks, bonds, exchange trade funds, options, call spreads, and put spreads. However, regulators have recently barred Cash Accounts from trading in call spreads and put spreads.

Their logic is that individuals lack the financial sophistication to engage in these types of trades. The reality is the opposite, they are limiting individuals to engage in higher risk positions while banning them from the lower risk ones. Welcome to the world of financial regulation!

The easy way around this is for individuals to set up a paper corporation for the purpose of handling their trading activities. This is far easier than it first appears. My friends at Halifax Investment Services will do this for you for as little at AUS$575. One swipe of your credit card and you are in business.

The benefits of doing this are huge. You can then execute every type of trade under the sun, including all of the Mad Hedge Fund Trader?s Trade Alerts. You can also reduce your tax rate from as high as 47% that hits profits in Cash Accounts to only a mere 30%. I don?t know how people in the Land Down Under view taxation, but here in the US it is absolutely despised.

Every professional trader in Australia operates through a corporate entity, and you would be mad not to do so. If the past is any guide, long-term followers of my service all have one problem in common: they make too much money, creating unforeseen tax headaches.

There is one other way to deal with the Australian regulator?s discrimination against individual investors: wait a couple months. They have been sued by a number of individuals and organizations seeking to block this double standard. My in country tax attorneys tell me that a resolution is expected soon. Once the issue is settled, the only difference between Reg T and Cash Accounts will be the tax rate.

To avail yourselves of these services, please open an account with Halifax Investment Services Ltd. by clicking here at http://madhedgefundradio.com/hisl-australia/. There, you will be asked to complete a form with your basic information. Within a few days, you should receive a phone call from a Halifax financial advisor who has been assigned to provide you assistance.

Good Luck and good trading!

Did You Say Only a 30% Tax Rate?

My friend, Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group, a global risk analyst who I regularly follow, has published an outstanding book entitled The End of the Free Markets: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations. I find this highly depressing, as it takes me as long to read one of Ian?s books as it takes him to write another one. To read a review of his highly insightful tome published in 2008, The Fat Tail: The Power of Political Knowledge for Strategic Investing, please click here. The world is reaching a tipping point. For the past 40 years, global multinationals with unfettered access to capital, consumer, and labor markets have driven the world economy. There is now a new competitor on the scene, the ?state capitalist,? where political considerations trump economic ones in the allocation of resources. Of course, China is the main player, joined by several other emerging nations. The Middle Kingdom has posted double-digit annual growth for the past 30 years without freedom of speech, economic rules of the road, and independent judiciary, and credible property rights. China?s leadership is clearly worried that Western style freedoms will enable wealth to be generated outside their control and be used to orchestrate their overthrow. Private Western companies can only engage in transactions, which stand on their own economically and deliver the short-term profits, which their shareholders demand. In China, long-term political goals enable them to pay through the nose to obtain stable supplies of oil, gas, minerals, and materials. That keeps the country?s massive work force employed, off the streets, and politically neutered. The bottom line is that there are now two competing forms of capitalism. The recent financial crisis has accelerated their entrance to the global stage, moving us from a G7 to a G20 dominated world. Globalization is not ending, but it is definitely entering a new chapter. For those of us who read tea leaves to ascertain major, market moving economic trends, this will be a must read. To buy the book at Amazon, please click here.

Please come to hear me, Mad Hedge Fund Trader John Thomas, as the keynote speaker at the Invest Like a Monster Las Vegas Conference on June 13-14.

I will be joined by many old friends from across the investment spectrum. Jon and Pete Najarian will teach you the tricks of the trade for navigating the ever complex options markets.

Fellow former combat pilot, Chuck Hughes, will go into depth on his own highly successful approach to trading the market. To listen to my in depth interview with him on Hedge Fund Radio, please click here.
Well known market commentator Guy Adami, the Prince of New Jersey, will be there to give his trading insights. So will former hedge fund manager and Yahoo Finance guru Jeff Macke.

The first day will be devoted to three educational sessions that get into the nitty gritty of trading options. The day winds up with a cocktail party with the Najarian Brothers and me.

I will kick off the Saturday session with and extended presentation on the long-term future of the financial markets, to be followed by an extensive question and answer session. I will be followed by an impressive lineup of market veterans.

The event will be held at the Bellagio Hotel on the Strip, my favorite Las Vegas haunt, best known for its spectacular water fountains out front. You may recognize it in the hit movies The Hangover and Ocean?s Eleven.

General admission costs $499 for the two full days. You can buy a VIP ticket for $699, which includes social events with the high and the mighty. It is all great value for the money, given the quality and quantity of the information you will obtain. Just click here: http://www.optionmonster.com/events/?refId=186 to buy tickets.

Trademonster?s proprietary program, called Heat Seeker ?, 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, every 33 minutes.

The 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. The firm then distills this ocean of data into the top movers of the day, which is put up for free on its website, and offers much more detailed analysis through a premium subscription product.

?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 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.

June is a great time to visit Sin City, as the crowds are largely gone and the sun is wonderfully baking hot. You can ride the neck-breaking roller coaster at the New York New York Hotel, catch one of eight Cirque du Soleil shows, and ride a gondola at the Venetian Hotel.

Or you can try to get a great deal on a luxury item from my buddy, Rick Harrison, at the famous Gold and Silver Pawn, of Pawn Stars fame (good luck with that!).

Just be sure to bring extra sun tan lotion!