Long-term readers of this letter are well aware of my pleadings with them a couple of years ago to buy Apple (AAPL) stock at $250 with a target of $1,000. Certainly, the 200 readers who work for Apple noticed. ?That was back when the main concern about the company was that Steve Jobs would die
My Fed Call. Survey traders and investors today, and you will find that 99% believe further quantitative easing via QE3 will be announced on Thursday. Poll vote Fed governors and you get a more realistic 50% probability. I think it is much less than that ? and therein lies the trade. I think that markets
Global Trading Dispatch?s Trade Alert Service posted a new all-time high yesterday, clocking a 63.2% return since inception. The 2012 YTD return is now at 23.05%. That takes the average annualized return up to 33.3%, ranking it among the top performing hedge funds in the world. Those happy subscribers who bought my service on May
Look at the charts for the barbarous relic below and you can only come to one possible conclusion. If the Federal Reserve disappoints on Thursday, just a little bit, even by a smidgeon, and does not deliver QE3 and gold sells off big, you should jump in and by the stuff like crazy. All of
NOTE TO READERS: There is a short letter today because I spent the entire weekend writing Trade Alerts, which you will receive right at the Monday morning opening. Last Friday, China announced a $150 billion reflationary public works budget designed to arrest the current free fall in the country?s GDP growth rate. The move came
Sell Short the Currency Shares Australian Dollar Trust October, 2012 (FXA) $105-$108 call spread at $0.35 or best Opening Trade 9-4-2012 ? 2:00 PM EST expiration date: October 19, 2012 Portfolio weighting: 10% = 45 contracts on a net delta adjusted basis This is a bet that the Currency Shares Australian Dollar Trust October, 2012
When communications between intelligence agencies suddenly spike, as has recently been the case, I sit up and take note. Hey, you don't think I talk to all of those generals because I like their snappy uniforms, do you? The word is that the despotic, authoritarian regime in Syria is on the verge of collapse, and
Cheers went up from the real estate industry this morning when the Standard & Poor?s/Case Shiller data was released. It showed the first year-on-year increases in prices since 2006. Calls went out from real estate agents around the country announcing that the bottom was in and that you better buy now before prices shoot up.
I was researching comparative Asian wage data the other day and was astounded with what I found. Textile workers earn $2.99 an hour in India (PIN), $1.84 in China (FXI), and $0.49 in Vietnam (VNM). This is an 18-fold increase in labor costs from $0.10 an-hour since Chinese industrialization launched in 1978. This compares to
I certainly hope you took my advice to load your portfolio with corn and gold and to dump your equities five years ago. What? You didn?t? Then you have almost certainly suffered on the performance front. According to data compiled by my former employer, the Financial Times, corn was the top performing asset class since
During my recent meeting with the senior portfolio managers of the big Swiss banks, I kept hearing the same word over and over: yield, yield, yield! The search for yield by end investors has become so overwhelming that it now trumps all other considerations. So I am starting a series of major pieces on the
It is a fact of life that markets get overstretched. Think of pulling on a rubber band too hard, or loading too many paddlers at one end of a canoe. Whatever the metaphor, the outcome is always unpleasant and sometimes disastrous. Take a look at the charts below and you can see how extended markets
Mr. Market sometimes speaks in mysterious tongues, and you really have to wonder what he is struggling to tell us by taking the Volatility Index (VIX) down to a subterranean $13 handle on Friday, a new five year low. A number of advisors have been recommending that investors load up on the (VIX) in recent
The Treasury bond market has just suffered one of the most horrific selloffs in recent memory, taking the yield on ten year paper up from 1.38% to an eye popping 1.83% in weeks, a three month high. Yields have just risen by an amazing 38%. This has dragged the principal Treasury bond ETF (TLT) down
Gold has clearly evolved into a call option on global quantitative easing. Don?t think of it just as the stuff your dentist puts in your teeth or the thing your girlfriends gets you to wrap around her finger anymore. I don?t think that the Federal Reserve will implement QE3 at its September 16-17 meeting, or
If volatility and lack of direction in the equity market are driving you nuts these days, thank your lucky stars you?re not in the oil market. Only last night, a Japanese supertanker plowed into a US Navy destroyer, causing prices to spike. That?s assuming that you had time to notice while sifting through numerous, contradictory
The stock of the day last Friday was, no doubt, JC Penny (JCP), one of the most heavily shorted stocks in the market, which announced Q2, 2012 earnings. Despite a huge miss, the stock soared by 20% because the losses were not as bad as many expected. This leads to the question of whether traders
Welcome to the ?Heads I win, tails you lose? market. The prospect of imminent quantitative easing by the US, Europe, China, and even Japan is supporting asset prices globally. The worse the economic data reports, the greater the likelihood of such action, and the higher prices can rise. In this topsy turvey world, bad becomes
As I expected, the wildly optimistic expectations for further quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve at yesterday?s Open Market Committee meeting were not matched with substance. All we got was a continuation of existing modest programs and some minor tweaking of language. Bernanke only managed to say that, ?further stimulus will be provided as needed.?
A couple of alleged Tweets, a few rumored phone calls, and what have we got? $2 trillion in new global stock market capitalization in hours. That was the bottom line after the purported communication between the staffs of Germany?s Angela Merkel, France?s Jean Francois Hollande, and ECB president Mario Draghi. But is the creation of