“The entire market is trading like a biotech stock,” said Steve Weiss, a portfolio manager.
Global Market Comments
August 9, 2024
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
TESTIMONIAL)
(AUGUST 15 LONDON ENGLAND STRATEGY LUNCHEON)
Hi, my name is Wilson and I've been with the Mad Hedge Fund Trader, John Thomas, since 2019. I caught the phenomenal returns in 2019 and 2020, somewhere in the order of the 80-90% returns for both of those years. I caught all of those trades—Nvidia (NVDA) the US Treasury bond fund (TLT), Tesla (TSLA), etc. Then in 2021, I started trading in some additional accounts and I have caught almost all of the trades since then as well, getting almost the entire amount of returns that John has received.
It’s been just fantastic!
Wilson
Mill Valley, California
"If you work forever, you can live forever," said my friend and mentor, Blackstone's Byron Wien.
Global Market Comments
August 8, 2024
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(THE IDIOT’S GUIDE TO INVESTING),
(TSLA), (BYND), (JPM)
(TESTIMONIAL)
Until July 1, everyone seemed to have pretty much the same investment strategy.
What would you do if I recommended an investment strategy that would cause your accountant to disown you, your inheritance anticipating children to sue you, and your wife to file for divorce?
Chances are you would designate all my future mailings as SPAM, unfriend me from Facebook, and tear my card out of your Rolodex.
Well, here is anyway. I’ll call it my “Ignore All Risk” portfolio. It’s really quite simple. This is all you have to do:
1) Buy stocks that have already gone up the most, boast the highest year-to-date performance, and have momentum overwhelmingly on their side. Only do what every else is doing. Go for the easy trade.
2) Buy stocks with the highest price earnings multiples. I’m talking mid to high hundreds.
3) Lean towards stocks with the highest short interest. GameStop (GME) was a perfect example of this.
4) Put every free penny you have into cryptocurrency bets, like Bitcoin
5) Ignore all valuations and fundamentals. Don’t waste a minute reading a single page of research, especially from an old-line legacy broker. Seeking Alpha, where none of the information is independently verified, is a far better source of information than JP Morgan (JPM).
6) Big institutions should allocate all of their assets only to their youngest traders and portfolio managers. Old farts, or anyone with any memory or experience whatsoever, should be completely ignored. A person who’s never seen a stock go down is now your best friend.
7) Oh, and there is one more thing. Go hugely overweight bonds over equities in the face of unprecedented and massive government borrowing at all-time low interest rates.
Any professional manager pursuing an approach like this would surely get fired, lose all of their securities registrations and licenses, and get banned from the industry for life.
But there is one big offset to these career-ending consequences. They would also be the top-performing money manager of the year, beating the pants off of all competitors. Every investment they made this year worked.
They would be regarded as trading genius on par with my friends Paul Tudor Jones and Appaloosa’s David Tepper. If they invested their own money using this strategy, they would be so filthy rich they wouldn’t care what happened to themselves.
We are now in an environment where EVERY trade is crowded, be they in equities, fixed income, or foreign exchange. There is no value anywhere. The metaphors coming to mind are legion. There are too many passengers on one side of the canoe. The lemmings are mindlessly stampeding towards a giant cliff. I could go on.
Of course, incredible excess liquidity is to blame. That is the only time both stocks AND bonds go up at the same time. The world’s central banks have been flooding the globe with cash for decades now, and the pandemic has given them license to increase these efforts vastly.
The end result has been to overvalue all assets classes, be they paper or hard. Cash is trash, especially in Japan and Europe where until recently you had to PAY banks to take your money.
The fact is that shares with the fastest price appreciation over the past 12 months are trading at valuations that are almost 50% higher than normal.
I have traded and invested through all of this before; the Nifty Fifty of the early 1970’s, the Great Japan Bubble of the 1980’s, the Dotcom Bubble of the 1990’s, and of course the 2007 bubble top. And there is one thing all of these market apexes have in common. They inflated a lot longer than anyone expected, sometimes FOR YEARS!
You could be conservative, go into 100% cash, and just stay on the sidelines until mass groupthink, hysteria, and insanity leave the market. But that could be a very long time.
And after more than a half-century in this business, there is one thing I know for sure. Traders who don’t trade, investors who don’t invest, and newsletters that don’t recommend all have one thing in common. THEY GET FIRED. Just because investing gets hard is no reason to quit the market.
The Japanese have a great expression for this: “When the fool is dancing, the greater fool is watching.” So, I’m going to start dancing away. What will it be? The cha cha, the limbo, or the Watusi?
Hmmmm. Let me see. Let me Google what everyone else is doing.
I would like to say a big Thank You for presenting such an amazing event, the Mad Hedge Traders & Investment Summit.
I really enjoyed it and learned a lot of amazing insights that I never knew were possible.
I do not know if you guys have sent out the recorded copies or if these are still in the works so let me know.
Can you please send me a copy or let me know how the process of this is going as I would really like to hear some of these speakers again.
Absolute Appreciation and Wishing You All Prospering Success!
Best Regards,
Troy
Note: the link to the Summit replay is found here.
"Everything is expensive now. Worries about the future can cause safe assets to become highly priced ... I call it the 'Titanic Effect.' When the Titanic was going down, people would pay a fortune for anything that floats. We may be in a Titanic situation now," said my buddy, Nobel Prize winner Robert Shiller.
Global Market Comments
August 7, 2024
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(PLAYING THE SHORT SIDE WITH VERTICAL BEAR PUT DEBIT SPREADS)
(TLT)
“I was shocked to see how predictable people were,” said Andreas Weigend, Amazon’s Chief Data Analyst.
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