Last week saw a dramatic deterioration in the economic data that has been the foundation of the Great Bull Market of 2012. First, we read minutes from a Federal Reserve meeting suggesting that QE3 has been put on a back burner. Then the Department of Labor?s Friday nonfarm payroll report poured gasoline on the fire,
With the Federal Reserve signaling yesterday that QE3 is off the table, many traders are now betting that the barbarous relic is about to take a prolonged vacation. Without a dividend or an interest yield in a world desperate for cash flow, the yellow metal suddenly doesn?t have so much to offer. Take away the
That is the conundrum facing traders, investors, and individuals as we enter the new quarter. For some hedge fund managers, Q1, 2012 was clearly the quarter from hell. I have been in the market for four decades, long enough to collect an encyclopedia worth of words of wisdom. One of my favorites has always been
You know how I love second helpings, especially when the sushi bar is involved. I especially like unagi, or cooked eel, which is said to be an oriental aphrodisiac. I am going to take advantage of Japan?s fiscal year end book closing on March 30 to reenter my short position of the Japanese yen. This
This time I am going to start with the fundamental argument first, then follow up with the Trade Alert. We are getting perilously close to a substantial pull back in global risk assets. While this has already started in commodities, the ags, oil, copper, and precious metals, we have yet to see the whites of
ETF's are much more attractive than mutual fund competitors, with their notoriously bloated expenses and spendthrift marketing costs. You can't miss those glitzy, overproduced, big budget ads on TV for a multitude of mutual fund families. You know, the ones with the senior couple holding hands walking down the beach into the sunset, the raging
After my year in the White House Press Corps, I vowed never to return, and took a really long shower, hoping to scrub every last spec of prejudice, self-interest, and institutionalized dishonesty off of my battered carcass. But sometimes I see some maneuvering that is so unprincipled, crooked, and against the national interest that I
The inside story on the collapse of volatility is now out, and as a result, managers are reviewing the harsh lessons learned and tweaking their strategies. It highlights the dangers of buying securities without reading the prospectus and understanding what is under the hood. As investors piled into stocks in February, they also bought downside
Looking for beneficiaries of the coming collapse of the Japanese yen (FXY), (YCS), Toyota Motors (TM) has to be at the very top of your list. A cheaper domestic currency brings a lower cost of production, high foreign sales proceeds, and wider profit margins all the way around. I am probably the only person in
I?m hearing from my buddies in Japan that while things are already quite bad in that enchanting country, they are about to get a whole lot worse, and that it is time to start scaling into a major short in the yen. Australia and China have already raised interest rates, to be followed by the
Long term readers of this letter are well aware of my antipathy towards General Motors (GM). For decades, the company turned a blind ear to customer complaints about shoddy, uncompetitive products, arcane management practices, entitled dealers, and a totally inward looking view of the world that was rapidly globalizing. It was like watching a close
The market was buzzing today about the continued collapse of volatility and the significance thereof today. Today the chief whipping boy was the double leveraged Velocity Shares 2X Vix ETF (TVIX), which cratered 33% on the day, and down 90% from its October high. This was on a day when the ETF should have gone
Much of Wall Street was scratching their heads yesterday as the iPath S&P 500 Vix Short Term Futures ETN (VXX) plunged to new lifetime lows despite a 69 point decline in the Dow index. It wasn?t supposed to work that way. Falling markets should send investors scrambling to buy downside protection in the form of
If you want to delve into the case against the long term future of US Treasury bonds in all their darkness, take a look at Foreign Affairs, the establishment bimonthly journal read by academics, intelligence agencies, and politicians alike, which I am sure you all have sitting on your nightstands. In a well-researched and thought
My inbox was clogged with responses to my ?Golden Age? for the 2020?s piece yesterday, particularly my forecast that the US was moving towards complete energy independence. This will be the most important change to the global economy for the next 20 years. So I shall go into more depth. The energy research house, Raymond
I received a flurry of inquires the other day when Ben Bernanke mention the word ?sterilization? in his recent congressional testimony. And he wasn?t giving advice to the country?s wayward teenaged girls, either. Sterilization refers to a specific style of monetary policy. Sterilized policies seek to manipulate the money markets without changing the overall money
I am constantly asked if there are any ways investors can take advantage of the collapse of the natural gas market, where at $2.34/MBTU prices are plumbing decade lows. I have recently made good money buying puts on the ETF (UNG), but these are not for the faint of heart. They call this contract the
I managed to catch a few comments in the distinct northern accent of Jim O'Neil, the fabled analyst who invented the 'BRIC' term, and who has been kicked upstairs to the chairman's seat at Goldman Sachs International (GS) in London. Jim thinks that it is still the early days for the space, and that these
If you think that the upcoming energy shortage is going to be bad, it will pale in comparison to the next water crisis. So investment in fresh water infrastructure is going to be a great recurring long term investment theme. One theory about the endless wars in the Middle East since 1918 is that they
Every time the price of oil spikes, we learn vast amounts of information about the global reach of this indispensable commodity. It's like taking a non-core elective in geology at college. So I was fascinated when I found the chart of relative sector winners and losers below. No surprise that energy does best from sky