Global Market Comments
March 6, 2023
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(MARKET OUTLOOK FOR THE WEEK AHEAD, or A WEEK WITH JOHN THOMAS)
(SPY), (TLT), (TSLA), (NVDA), (WEAT)
CLICK HERE to download today's position sheet.
In 1942, after the First Marine Division won the battle of Guadalcanal and my Uncle Mitch won his Medal of Honor, they were shipped to Melbourne, Australia for six months of rest and relaxation.
Since their uniforms were in rags and many men were barefoot, they were handed scratchy WWI surplus wool uniforms. That’s all the Aussies had, as their army was off fighting Rommel in North Africa.
All 8,000 men lived in the Melbourne Cricket Ground, and the government delivered a truckload of beer barrels every day. Whenever the men went outside, they were invited by local families off the street to have dinner. After four months, they were fat and happy.
Then one day, they were placed on a train with full battle gear, taken 50 miles out of town, and told to walk back with no food and a canteen of water. They were retraining for the next battle, which would be in New Guinea.
When economic data flip-flops, so does the market.
The red-hot January Nonfarm Report with the Unemployment Rate at a 50-year low of 3.5% gave the bulls every reason to buy stock. So stocks can’t fall.
But a strong jobs market means the Fed will keep interest rates higher for longer gives plenty of fodder for the bears. So stocks can’t rise.
My Mad Hedge Market Timing Index is equally confused at 55. You can’t get any closer to 50, which means you should do absolutely nothing.
Notice that the S&P 500 (SPY) bounced off the 200-day moving average at $390.95 to the penny and rallied, a perfect symptom of this disease. When the fundamentals are confused, technicals win.
At this late age, the only one I take orders from is named Mr. Market. Ignore his instructions at your own peril and expense. Everyone else can get lost.
That leaves us nothing to do but to wait for the next events of market consequence, the March 14 CPI and the December 22 Fed interest rate decision. We might as well twiddle our thumbs and watch the clock until then.
So I will stick to my market-neutral strategy as long as I must take in enough money to keep the lights on. I keep doing this knowing full well that the last time I do will lose money.
This could go on for months.
In the meantime, I will keep researching the long term, which continues to look better and better. The dross ends in months. It’s the next decade we need to focus on now.
It's time to polish our armor, sharpen our weapons, and get back in shape, just as the First Marine Division did 81 years ago.
Remember that we are in the “what’s next” business. Whatever you buy now has to be discounting the following coming trends:
Falling interest rates
A weak dollar
Rising commodity prices
Rising energy prices
Reaccelerating tech earnings
A new boom in real estate
Precious metals going to record highs
Strong emerging markets
A Ukraine win leading to global peace
America’s principal adversary is rendered impotent
A second peace dividend ensues
Every trade alert I send you this year will be taking of one or more of these trends. It’s just a matter of time before they begin if they haven’t already.
We had a really great last two days of February, pushing me back in the green for February, taking me up +3.41% on the month. March has so far come in at +0.80%.
My 2023 year-to-date performance is still at the top at +26.56%. The S&P 500 (SPY) is up +6.36% so far in 2023. My trailing one-year return maintains a sky-high +85.51% versus -5.66% for the S&P 500.
That brings my 15-year total return to +623.75%, some 2.72 times the S&P 500 (SPX) over the same period. My average annualized return has recovered to +47.37%, still the highest in the industry.
Nothing Happens Until March 14, at 8:30 AM EST when the next big inflation read, the Core CPI comes out. It’s all about inflation right now. Look for a flat line until then. That’s why it’s a good time to run short strangles and own lots of cash. A dollar at a market bottom is worth $10 at a market top.
S&P Case Shiller Gains 5.7% in December, YOY according to its National Home Price Index. That’s a quarter of the gains seen a year ago. Miami (15.9%), Tampa (13.9%), and Atlanta (10.4%) showed the biggest gains. High mortgage interest rates are still a big drag and will continue for another six months.
Pending Home Sales Soar 8.7% in January on a signed contract basis. It is the second straight month of gains and the biggest in 2 ½ years. See what a 1.5% drop in mortgage rates can do? While rates are back up now it shows how much demand is building up in the residential real estate market. I think this market explodes to the upside by yearend.
Mortgage Rates Jump to 6.65%, snuffing out the green shoots that briefly appeared in January. Mortgages are still maintaining an unprecedented 200 basis point premium to 30-year Treasury bond rates, which should disappear by yearend. The seeds of the next housing boom are germinating.
Tesla Tanks Semiconductor Shares, after Elon Musk announced that he plans to cut silicon carbide chips by 75%. Improved new designs will also slash the number of chips needed for EVs, whose supply and prices are notoriously volatile. New chip designs will appear in the $25,000 model 2 due out in 2025.
Ark’s Dirty Little Secret. Cathy Woods’ ARK Innovation Fund (ARKK) is one of the top-performing funds so far in 2023, up 24%. But strip out the performance of Tesla (TSLA) and the five-year return has been precisely zero. Good thing (TSLA) is up 110% this year. Maybe its cheaper just to buy (TSLA) and skip the dross and high management fees at Ark? Elon Musk thinks it’s going to $1,000 a share and so do I. Oh, and they just dropped the price of their top end Model X by $20,000.
Stellantis (STLA) Buys a Copper Mine, taking a 14.2% stake in Argentina’s McEwen Copper mine. Gee, do you think the owner of the Chrysler brand is going into EVs? They also laid off 2,000 because with 80% fewer parts EVs require far less workers. Buy Copper and Freeport McMoRan (FCX) on dips. The global copper shortage is imminent.
China Manufacturing PMI Hits 11-Year High, at 52.6 in a surprising comeback from the end of covid lockdowns. The news hit the bond market, worried about rising inflation prospects. Supply chain problems in the US should ease as a result.
Wheat Prices Crash, seeing a 6% dive in February. What always follows a food shortage? A food glut, as farmers overplant to cash in on generous government subsidies, creating a bumper crop. It’s only a 100-year cycle. Prices will stay low as long as Ukraine can keep exporting.
My Ten-Year View
When we come out the other side of the recession, we will be perfectly poised to launch into my new American Golden Age, or the next Roaring Twenties. The economy decarbonizing and technology hyper accelerating, creating enormous investment opportunities. The Dow Average will rise by 800% to 240,000 or more in the coming decade. The new America will be far more efficient and profitable than the old.
Dow 240,000 here we come!
On Monday, March 6 at 7:00 AM EST, US Factory Orders are out.
On Tuesday, March 7 January 31 at 7:00 AM EST, the Federal Reserve Governor Jerome Powell testifies in front of congress.
On Wednesday, March 8 at 7:00 AM EST, the JOLTS Job Opening Report is released.
On Thursday, March 9 at 8:30 AM EST, the Weekly Jobless Claims are announced.
On Friday, March 10 at 8:30 AM EST, the Nonfarm Payroll Report for February is released.
As for me, while I was in Hawaii the other week, I took the opportunity to meet up with my old friend, David, who reminded me of the week to end all week 25 years ago.
I first met David at a Tokyo karate dojo in 1974 when he was 16 and his dad was the Associated Press Bureau Chief.
As we were about the same size, Higaona Sensei paired is off as sparing partners. But to fight, David had to take off his glasses. It wasn’t long before I saw my front teeth flying across the room and skittering across the teak floorboards.
I next met David at Morgan Stanley when I was a London director, and he was a junior trader in Tokyo. After that, I took off to start my own hedge fund.
When Morgan ordered him to meet with their traders in Zurich, Switzerland, I saw the perfect excuse for an adventure. Starting in London, we first dropped off our wives for a week of shopping in Paris, flying my twin Cessna 340.
I used my old trick of getting permission to fly over the center of Paris so I could waggle my wings at the tourists as we passed the top of the Eiffel Tower.
In Zurich, I got in a fight with the tower because they ordered me into a parking stand that was still under construction. I left David to his meetings, thus enabling us to bill the entire trip to Morgan Stanley, aviation fuel, five-star hotels, three-star restaurants, and all. If you did that today at (MS) you’d probably get fired.
I then flew off to pick up a couple of cases of first-growth French wines from the owners in Bordeaux to kill time.
When I picked up David the next day, we headed south. It was a clear day, so I thought it might be a good time to visit the Matterhorn summit. As we circled, the day’s successful climbers waved their ice axes. Then it was up the Rhone River Valley, threading an Alpine valley.
When I realized that I couldn’t climb fast enough to escape the valley, I executed a quick Immelman turn. You’re never supposed to do this in a twin because there is a risk of entering a flat spin (watch the Top Gun movie to see what this is).
But I had my British Aerobatics license, my Swiss Alpine license, plenty of speed, and an oversupply of confidence, so I figured we’d be OK. I performed the first half of a loop, then at the top, I flipped the plane 180 degrees, thus righting it and heading in the opposite direction. But I think we singed the rear ends of a few mountain goats on the way.
Needless to say, this caught David’s attention.
When I popped out of the top of the Alps, I was immediately intercepted by a Mirage fighter from the Swiss Air Force. I was now in military air space. He took a few runs at me at just under Mach 1, using me for target practice. Once I was identified he went on off his merry way.
Now I was lost.
All the maneuvering put me too low to intercept any European navigational aids. So we just looked out the window. Eventually, we noticed that to roof tiles of the city below us were red, which meant we had to be over Italy. I correctly identified it as Bolzano. From there I calculated a direct track to the airfield at St. Moritz in Switzerland.
We stayed at the legendary Badrutt’s Palace Hotel. The next day, we took a cable car to the highest peak. While American ski resorts offer cheeseburgers or pizza, Swiss ones have Michelin Three Star Restaurants. We enjoyed the meal of a lifetime.
When the Tokyo stock market crashed, Morgan Stanley let go of most of its Tokyo staff. David landed on his feet, taking over as the head of trading at Lehman Brothers. He later moved on to a hedge fund, cashing in its Lehman stock well before he went under.
David later retired to the North Share of Oahu in Hawaii, and I visit whenever I’m in town. He is very proud of his tropical fruit orchard. When the 50-foot waves crash at nearby Waimea Bay, the ground shakes.
Whenever I see David, he reminds me of our “lost week” over the Alps. It was the most exciting week of his life. And I always respond, “But David, every week is like that for me.”
When I visit Bolzano this summer to research the battles there in WWI in which my great uncle perished, I’ll ask the residents if they noticed a lost airplane overhead 25 years ago.
Good Luck and Good Trading
John Thomas
CEO & Publisher
The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader
The First Marine Division in the Melbourne Cricket Ground in 1942
Higaona Sensei in 1974
Badrutt’s Palace Hotel in St. Moritz
Refueling my Cessna 340 in 1988
Global Market Comments
March 3, 2023
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(THURSDAY, JULY 6 NEW YORK STRATEGY LUNCHEON),
(DINNER WITH NOBEL PRIZE WINNER JOSEPH STIGLITZ)
CLICK HERE to download today's position sheet.
The great thing about interviewing Joseph Stiglitz over dinner is that you don't have to ask any questions. You just turn him on, and he spits out one zinger after another.
And he does this in a kibitzing, wizened, grandfatherly manner like one would expect from a character that just walked off the set of Fiddler on the Roof.
The unfortunate thing is that you also don't get to eat. The Columbia University professor and former World Bank Chief Economist animatedly talked the entire time, and I was too busy feverishly taking notes to ingest a single crouton.
Stiglitz argued that for 30 years after the end of the Great Depression, there was no financial crisis because a newly empowered SEC was on the beat, and everything worked.
A deregulation trend that started under Reagan began stripping away those protections, with the eventual disastrous repeal of the Glass-Steagle Act in 1999, which kept commercial banks out of the securities business. The philosophical justification adopted by many economists, including Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, was that unfettered markets always lead to efficient outcomes.
This belief was based on simplistic models assuming that markets were always perfect, always open, and that everyone had perfect information. Stiglitz's own work on “information asymmetry,” which earned him a Nobel Prize in economics in 2001, pulled the rug out from under this theory because it showed that one party to a transaction always has more information than the other, usually the seller. I have heard investing oracle, Warren Buffet, tell me the exact same thing.
The banks used this window to introduce super-leveraged derivatives that had never been regulated, studied, or even understood. But they looked great on paper. They then clawed open accounting loopholes that were so imaginative that, not only were shareholders and regulators deceived about how much risk was involved, senior management was clueless as well. Instead of managing risk, they created and multiplied risk.
A 2006 GDP that was 80% derived from real estate transactions and a savings rate that fell to zero meant that a severe crash was a sure thing. President Bush's response was to unleash an extreme form of “trickle-down economics,” with the banks given $700 billion with no conditions attached.
Intended to recapitalize the banks so they could resume lending to the mainstream economy, much of the money ended up being paid out in bonuses and dividends to foreign counterparties. Of the $180 billion used to rescue AIG, $13 billion went to Goldman Sachs, and much of the rest went to German and French banks.
No wonder Main Street feels cheated.
The financial system is now more distorted than ever, with smaller banks that actually lend to consumers and small businesses going under in record numbers because the playing field is so uneven. There are too many structural conflicts of interest.
The “once in a 100-year tsunami” argument is merely a justification for changing nothing. Banks would rather maintain the fiction that the loans on their books are good than making adjustments. No financial system has ever wasted assets on this scale, and the end result will be a national debt many tens of trillions of dollars larger.
The 2009 $887 billion stimulus package was too small, and should have been at least $1.2 trillion, but there was no way Obama was going to get more out of congress. The 40% of the stimulus that was tax cuts was saved or put into Treasury bonds and created no immediate beneficial effects on the economy.
More money should have gone to the states which, unable to deficit spend, are now a huge drag on the economy. But even this meager package was able to prevent the unemployment rate from rising from 10% to 12%, as it was set to do. Any major spending cuts will produce “Hoover” type outcomes.
Well, I don't get to chat at length with a Nobel Prize winner every day, so I thought I'd give you the full blast, even though I had to leave a lot out. For a dinner that I could actually eat, I walked next-door for a Big Mac meal and supersized the fries.
Global Market Comments
March 2, 2023
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(TOUCHING BASE WITH WARREN BUFFET),
(BRK/B), (AMEX), (KO), (MS), (TSLA)
CLICK HERE to download today's position sheet.
So how does someone with 55 years of investment experience like me learn something new? Listen to someone with 80 years of experience.
It is with great anticipation that I read Warren Buffett’s annual letter to shareholders. Having banged the table for decades that his Berkshire Hathaway (BRK/B) is a “must own” stock, keeping up with the 92-year-old Oracle of Omaha” is essential.
Besides, Warren was one of the founding subscribers to The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader 15 years ago.
I’ll give you the high points.
Berkshire companies took in a record $30.8 billion in operating profits in 2022, producing a net 3% gain in the share price.
Sounds like a deal to me!
Buffett describes himself as a business picker, not a stock picker. Over time, the great businesses prosper and compound, while the poor ones fail. The flowers bloom and the weeds wither away.
One need look no further than the Dow Average, where NO stocks were able to stay in the index over the last 100 years because of business failures. (Corn Products Refining Company? Woolworth’s? Union Carbide?). This is known as “creative destruction,” which moves capital out of the past and into the future.
“Efficient” markets exist only in textbooks, their day-to-day behavior “baffling” and only understood in retrospect.
In the ultimate act of humility, Buffet confesses to only making a dozen good decisions in his life. Coca Cola (KO) was one of those. His initial investment of $1.3 billion in 1994 is now worth $25 billion and now spins off an annual dividend of $700 million.
American Express (AXP) is the same, the initial 1995 investment of $1.3 billion is now worth $22 billion, paying $302 billion a year in dividends. Over the same time frame, an investment in 30-years bonds yielded nothing.
Warren makes the case for share buybacks, which he regularly executes whenever (BRK/B) trades at a discount. When the share count goes down, the shareholders’ ownership of the businesses goes up. This is how Berkshire created many $100 millionaires over the years.
Buffet also makes his annual case for the “Great American Tailwind.” In Buffet’s 80 years of investing, he has only seen it becalmed occasionally and briefly. Never bet against America.
Buffet started his investing career in April of 1942. Unknown to him, the US was about to win the Battle of Midway. Stocks bottomed and launched a torrid 20-year run, even though the public was unaware of the victory for three more months. It’s proof that markets see things before we mere mortals do.
As for me, I suppose I have to be even more humble than Warren Buffet, for I have only made four good investment decisions in 50 years. I agreed to accept a job offer from The Economist magazine in London, kicking off a half-century of intensive research. I took a big pay cut to go to work for Morgan Stanley (MS), which rewarded me with pre-IPO stock at book value of 25 cents a share. I bought Apple (AAPL) at $2 when Steve Jobs returned to run the company on the edge of bankruptcy. I bought Tesla (TSLA) at a split-adjusted $2.35 a share in 2010, completely buying into Elon Musk’s 30-year vision.
I only have to live another 17 years to see if he was right.
It Only Took Four Good Decisions
Global Market Comments
March 1, 2023
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
The United States Treasury Bond Fund (TLT) February 2024 $100-$105
at-the-money vertical Bull Call debit spread LEAPS
CLICK HERE to download today's position sheet.
BUY the United States Treasury Bond Fund (TLT) February 2024 $100-$105 at-the-money vertical Bull Call debit spread LEAPS at $2.50 or best
Opening Trade
3-1-2023
expiration date: February 16, 2024
Number of Contracts = 1 contract
A $10 selloff in the (TLT) is a great entry point for a LEAPS. This is a gift from the US House of Representatives which is threatening to throw the entire government bond market into default by summer.
If you are a trader, default threats are where you BUY bonds.
While the chance of winning a real lottery is something like a million to one, this one is more like 10:1 in your favor. And the payoff is a double in little more than a year. That is the probability that (TLT) shares will rise by only 3.32% over the next 12 months.
The logic behind this LEAPS is fairly simple.
After keeping interest rates too low for too long, then raising them too far too fast, what does the Fed do next? It then lowers interest rates too far too fast. In other words, a mistake-prone Jay Powell will keep on making mistakes. That’s what you get with a Fed chair who only has a degree in political science.
The rate of interest rate rises has been the most rapid in history and is certain to trigger a recession in 2023. When the recession hits, demand for money will dry up and interest rates will collapse. Yields on ten-year US Treasury bonds that bottomed at 0.32% in 2020 and reached a peak of 4.46% in October will easily fall back down to 2.50% by the time this LEAPS matures. That’s where we were last April and will take the (TLT) at least back up to $120.
I am using the very conservative $100-$105 strike price in case bonds continue bouncing along a bottom before turning in a few months. If a double in a year is not enough for you, perhaps you should consider another line of business.
I am therefore buying the United States Treasury Bond Fund (TLT) February 2024 $100-$105 at-the-money vertical Bull Call spread LEAPS at $2.50 or best.
Don’t pay more than $3.00 or you’ll be chasing on a risk/reward basis.
I am going out to only a February 16, 2024 expiration because I think this trade will work fairly quickly with a 2023 recession, even a mild one. Please note that these options are illiquid, and it may take some work to get in or out. Executing these trades is more an art than a science.
Let’s say the United States Treasury Bond Fund (TLT) February 2024 $100-$105 at-the-money vertical Bull Call spread LEAPS are showing a bid/offer spread of $2.00-$3.00, which is typical. Enter an order for one contract at $2.00, another for $2.10, another for $2.20, and so on. Eventually, you will enter a price that gets filled immediately. That is the real price. Then enter an order for your full position at that real price.
A lot of people ask me about the appropriate size. Remember, if the (TLT) does NOT rise by 3.32% in 12 months, the value of your investment goes to zero. The way to play this is to buy LEAPS in ten different names. If one out of ten increases ten times, you break even. If two of ten work you double your money, and if only three of ten work, you triple your money.
You never should have a position that is so big that you can’t sleep at night, or worse, need to call John Thomas asking if you should sell at a market bottom.
There is another way to cash in. Let’s say we get half of your double in the next three months which, from these low levels, is entirely possible. Then you could earn half of the maximum potential profit in months. You can decide whether to keep the threefold return or go for the full five-bagger. It’s a nice problem to have.
Notice that the day-to-day volatility of LEAPS prices is miniscule since the time value is so great. This means that the day-to-day moves in your P&L will be small. It also means you can buy your position over the course of a month just entering new orders every day. I know this can be tedious but getting screwed by overpaying for a position is even more tedious.
Look at the math below and you will see that a 3.32% rise in (TLT) shares will generate a 100% profit with this position, such is the wonder of LEAPS. That gives you an implied leverage of 30:1 across the $100-$105 space.
If you want to get more aggressive you can buy the United States Treasury Bond Fund (TLT) February 2024 $115-$120 out-of-the-money vertical Bull Call spread LEAPS for $1.00, giving you a potential profit of 400%. I can do this trade and sleep at night. I’m not so sure about you.
Only use a limit order. DO NOT USE MARKET ORDERS UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. Just enter a limit order and work it.
This is a bet that the (TLT) will not fall below $105 by the January 17, 2024 options expiration in 12 months.
Here are the specific trades you need to execute this position:
Buy 1 February 2024 (TLT) $100 calls at………….………$7.00
Sell short 1 February 2024 (TLT) $105 calls at….………$4.50
Net Cost:………………………….………..........………….….....$2.50
Potential Profit: $5.00 - $2.50 = $2.50
(1 X 100 X $2.50) = $250 or 100% in 12 months.
To see how to enter this trade in your online platform, please look at the order ticket below, which I pulled from Interactive Brokers.
If you are uncertain on how to execute an options spread, please watch my training video on “How to Execute a Vertical Bull Call Debit Spread” by clicking here.
The best execution can be had by placing your bid for the entire spread in the middle market and waiting for the market to come to you. The difference between the bid and the offer on these deep in-the-money spread trades can be enormous.
Don’t execute the legs individually or you will end up losing much of your profit. Spread pricing can be very volatile on expiration months farther out.
Global Market Comments
February 28, 2023
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(THE 15-YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF THE MAD HEDGE FUND TRADER)
CLICK HERE to download today's position sheet.
The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader is now celebrating its 15th year of publication.
During this time, I have religiously pumped out 3,000 words a day, or 15 newsletters a week, of original, independent-minded, hard-hitting, and often wickedly funny research.
I spent my life as a war correspondent, Marine Corps combat pilot, Wall Street trader, and hedge fund manager, and if you can’t laugh after that, something is wrong with you.
I’ve been covering stocks, bonds, commodities, foreign exchange, energy, precious metals, real estate, and even agricultural products.
You’ve been kept up on my travels around the world and listened in on my conversations with those who drive the financial markets.
I also occasionally opine on politics, but only when it has a direct market impact, such as with the recent administration's economic and trade policies. There is no profit in taking a side.
The site now contains over 20 million words, or 30 times the length of Tolstoy’s epic War and Peace.
Unfortunately, it feels like I have written on every possible topic at least 100 times over.
So, I am reaching out to you, the reader, to suggest new areas of research that I may have missed until now that you believe justify further investigation.
Please send any and all ideas directly to me at support@madhedgefundtrader.com, and put “RESEARCH IDEA” in the subject line.
The great thing about running an online business is that I can evolve it to meet your needs on a daily basis.
Many of the new products and services that I have introduced since 2008 have come at your suggestion. That has enabled me to improve the product’s quality, to your benefit. Notice how rapidly my trade alert performance is going up, now annualizing at +47% a year.
This originally started out as a daily email to my hedge fund investors giving them an update on fast market-moving events. That was at a time when the financial markets were in free fall, and the end of the world seemed near.
Here’s a good trading rule of thumb: Usually, the world doesn’t end. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes.
The daily emails gave me the scalability that I so desperately needed. Today’s global mega enterprise grew from there. Today, the Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader and its Global Trading Dispatch is read in over 140 countries by 30,000 followers. The Mad Hedge Technology Letter and the Mad Hedge Biotech & Healthcare Letter also have substantial followings. And Mad Hedge Hot Tips is one of the most widely-read publications in the financial industry.
I’m weak in distribution in North Korea and Mali, in both cases due to the lack of electricity. But that may change.
One can only hope.
If you want to read my first pitiful attempt at a post, please click here for my February 1, 2008 post at
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/february-1-2008/
It urged readers to buy gold at $950 (it soared to $1,975), and buy the Euro at $1.50 (it went to $1.60).
Now you know why this letter has become so outrageously popular.
Unfortunately, I also recommended that they sell bonds short. I wasn’t wrong on that one, just early, about eight years too early.
I always get asked how long will I keep doing this?
I am already collecting Social Security, so that deadline came and went. My old friend and early Mad hedge subscriber, Warren Buffet is still working at 92, so that seems like a realistic goal.
Hiking ten miles a day with a 50-pound pack, my doctor tells me I should live forever. He says he spends all day trying to convince his other patients to be like me, and the only one who actually does it is me.
The harsh truth is that I don’t know how to NOT work. Never tried it, never will.
The fact is that thousands of subscribers love me for what I do, pay for me to travel around the world first class to the most exotic destinations, eat in the best restaurants, fly the rarest historical aircraft, then say thank you. I even get presents (keep those pounds of fudge and bottles of bourbon coming!).
Given the absolute blast I have doing this job, I would be Mad to actually retire.
Take a look at the testimonials I get only on an almost daily basis and you’ll see why this business is so hard to walk away from (click here).
In the end, you are going to have to pry my cold dead fingers off of this keyboard to get me to give up.
Fiat Lux (let there be light).
