Mad Day Trader Jim Parker is a modest guy. He has never been one to boast of his many achievements. If he does a great trade, he simply marks it in the ?WIN? column and moves on to the next trade.
I, however, am not Jim Parker.
As you may have noticed over the years, I have no hesitation whatsoever about singing my own praises, as well as those of others. So, I will bang his drum for him.
A week ago, Jim piled his followers into the (USO) March $17.5 puts at 35 cents. These are the short dated options which expire this coming Friday, March 20.
With a 15%, $7 crash in the price of oil that followed immediately afterwards, where are these options trading now? How about $1.50, a meteoric increase of 429%!
It gets better. The oil market is in the midst of a capitulation selloff, which could reach a crescendo with the Friday options and futures expiration. There is a distinct possibility that oil could visit the $30 handle then.
Where would that value the (USO) March $17.5 puts? How about $5.00. That would deliver a ten-day, eye popping profit of 1,429%!
While other newsletters promise these blistering results in their marketing blurbs, the Mad Hedge Fund Trader is one of the very few that actually delivers the goods.
This is nothing new for the Mad Hedge Fund Trader. It is only the latest in a series of prescient forecasts that we have been making about the energy markets for years.
Maybe the five years I spent in east Texas getting oil under my fingernails in the Barnet Shale have something to do with it.
To show you how far ahead of the curve I have been, I have included two archival pieces below.
The first was published in February, 2012 and lays out the logic behind my expectation that progress on nuclear talks with Iran would kill the risk premium the price of oil has enjoyed for years, taking it to as low as $30 a barrel, and lead to a Pax Americana.
That is exactly what is happening now, but my readers learned of the prospect three years in advance.
I ran the second piece in January 27 this year warning readers not to chase the oil rally because an impending storage Armageddon guaranteed that the worst was yet to come, the bottom for Texas tea. We hit new lows today.
Not only did I call the first oil crash, I nailed the second one as well.
I subscribe to a couple of very expensive oil industry newsletters that are great with passing on raw data about endless esoteric minutia, like rig counts, futures spreads and global demand at the micro level.
Not one saw the big picture, that the commodity that they live and breathe for was about to halve in price.
Enjoy the pieces. They are still relevant.
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When communications between intelligence agencies suddenly spike, as has recently been the case, I sit up and take note.
Hey, do you 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. The body count is mounting, and the only question now is whether Bashar al-Assad will flee to an undisclosed African country or get dragged out of a storm drain to take a bullet in his head.
It couldn?t happen to a nicer guy.
The geopolitical implications for the US are enormous. With Syria gone, Iran will be the last rogue state hostile to the US in the Middle East, and it is teetering. The next and final domino of the Arab spring falls squarely at the gates of Tehran.
Remember that the first real revolution in the region was the street uprising there in 2009. That revolt was successfully suppressed with an iron fist by fanatical and pitiless Revolutionary Guards.
The true death toll will never be known, but is thought to be in the thousands. The antigovernment sentiments that provided the spark never went away and they continue to percolate just under the surface.
At the end of the day, the majority of the Persian population wants to join the tide of globalization. They want to buy IPods and blue jeans, communicate freely through their Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, and have the jobs to pay for it all.
Since 1979, when the Shah was deposed, a succession of extremist, ultraconservative governments ruled by a religious minority, have failed to cater to these desires
When Syria collapses, the Iranian ?street? will figure out that if they spill enough of their own blood that regime change is possible and the revolution there will reignite.
The Obama administration is now pulling out all the stops to accelerate the process. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has stiffened her rhetoric and worked tirelessly behind the scenes to bring about the collapse of the Iranian economy.
The oil embargo she organized is steadily tightening the noose, with heating oil and gasoline becoming hard to obtain. Yes, Russia and China are doing what they can to slow the process, but conducting international trade through the back door is expensive, and prices are rocketing.
The unemployment rate is 25%. Iranian banks are about to get kicked out of the SWIFT international settlements system, which would be a death blow to their trade.
Let?s see how docile these people remain when the air conditioning quits running this summer because of power shortages. Iran is a rotten piece of fruit ready to fall of its own accord and go splat. Hillary is doing everything she can to shake the tree. No military action of any kind is required on America?s part.
The geopolitical payoff of such an event for the US would be almost incalculable. A successful revolution will almost certainly produce a secular, pro-Western regime whose first priority will be to rejoin the international community and use its oil wealth to rebuild an economy now in tatters.
Oil will lose its risk premium, now believed by the oil industry to be $30 a barrel. A looming supply could cause prices to drop to as low as $30 a barrel.
This would amount to a gigantic tax $1.66 trillion tax cut for not just the US, but the entire global economy as well (87 million barrels a day X 365 days a year X $100 dollars a barrel X 50%). Almost all funding of terrorist organizations will immediately dry up.
I might point out here that this has always been the oil industry?s worst nightmare.
At that point, the US will be without enemies, save for North Korea, and even the Hermit Kingdom could change with a new leader in place. A long Pax Americana will settle over the planet.
The implications for the financial markets will be enormous. The US will reap a peace dividend as large or larger than the one we enjoyed after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1992.
As you may recall, that black swan caused the Dow Average to soar from 2,000 to 10,000 in less than eight years, also partly fueled by the technology boom. A collapse in oil imports will cause the US dollar to rocket.
An immediate halving of our defense spending to $400 billion or less and burgeoning new tax revenues would cause the budget deficit to collapse. With the US government gone as a major new borrower, interest rates across the yield curve will fall further.
A peace dividend will also cause US GDP growth to reaccelerate from 2% to 4%. Risk assets of every description will soar to multiples of their current levels, including stocks, bonds, commodities, precious metals, and food.
The Dow will soar to 20,000, the Euro collapses to parity, gold rockets to $2,300 and ounce, silver flies to $100 an ounce, copper leaps to $6 a pound, and corn recovers $8 a bushel. The 60 bull market in bonds ends.
Some 1.5 million of the armed forces will get dumped on the job market as our manpower requirements shrink to peacetime levels. But a strong economy should be able to soak these well trained and motivated people right up. We will enter a new Golden Age, not just at home, but for civilization as a whole.
Wait, you ask, what if Iran develops an atomic bomb and holds the US at bay? Don?t worry. There is no Iranian nuclear device. There is no Iranian nuclear program. The entire concept is an invention of American intelligence agencies as a means to put pressure on the regime.
The head of the miniscule effort they have was assassinated by Israeli intelligence two weeks ago (a magnetic bomb, placed on a moving car, by a team on a motorcycle, nice!).
If Iran had anything substantial in the works, the Israeli planes would have taken off a long time ago. There is no plan to close the Straits of Hormuz, either. The training exercises we have seen are done for CNN?s benefit, and comprise no credible threat.
I am a firm believer in the wisdom of markets, and that the marketplace becomes aware of major history changing events well before we mere individual mortals do.
The Dow began a 25 year bull market the day after American forces defeated the Japanese in the Battle of Midway in May of 1942, even though the true outcome of that confrontation was kept top secret for years.
If the collapse of Iran was going to lead to a global multi decade economic boom and the end of history, how would the stock markets behave now?
They would rise virtually every day, led by the technology sector and banks, offering no pullbacks for latecomers to get in. That is exactly what they have been doing since mid-December.
If you think I?m ?Mad?, just check out Apple?s chart below, and the big relative underperformance of oil.
?
Here?s The Next Big Short
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The most powerful weapon of a modern army is the printing press,? said T.E. Lawrence, otherwise know as Lawrence of Arabia.
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Featured Trade: (FRIDAY, APRIL 3 HONOLULU, HAWAII STRATEGY LUNCHEON) (THE CRASH COMING TO A MARKET NEAR YOU), ?(TLT), (TBT), (A TOUCHDOWN FOR USC), (INTC)
iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond (TLT) ProShares UltraShort 20+ Year Treasury (TBT) Intel Corporation (INTC)
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I?m sure that most of you are spending your free time devouring the utterly fascinating pages of Fifty Shades of Gray these days. I, however, am reading slightly different subject matter.
As obscure, academic and abstruse the ?Global Dollar Credit: Links to US Monetary Policy and Leverage? may sound, published by the Bank for International Settlements, it has been an absolute blockbuster among strategists at the major hedge funds.
And given the apocalyptic conclusions of the report, it might well rank as one of the best horror stories of the year, worthy of the bloodiest zombie flic.
I?ll give it to you it a nutshell.
Corporate borrowers outside the US have ramped up their borrowing astronomically over the past 15 years, from $2 trillion to $9 trillion. This makes them extraordinarily sensitive to any rise in US interest rates and the dollar. Emerging market debt alone has doubled to $4.5 trillion.
Easy money has encouraged mal investment and overinvestment in projects that would have never seen the light of day if financing were not available at 1%. In other words, it is all a giant house of cards ready to collapse.
That could happen as soon as Wednesday, if the Federal Reserve removes the word ?patient? from its forward guidance.
I know a lot of you thrive on folk based economic theories you picked on the Internet based on monetarism, Austrian economics and the theories of Friedrich von Hayek, that all have the dollar collapsing under a mountain of debt.
In fact, the complete opposite has come true. The global economy has become ?dollarized,? with companies and governments in almost all nations relying on the buck as their principal means of financing.
The end result of all this has been to vastly expand the power of the Federal Reserve far beyond America?s borders. Even the smallest rise in US interest rates, like the ?% hike mooted for June, could trigger a cascade of corporate defaults around the world. Think of subprime, with a turbocharger.
We are already starting to see some cracks. The complete collapse of a number of emerging market currencies, like the Brazilian Real, Turkish Lira, South African Rand, Malaysian Ringgit and the Russian Ruble, has been accelerated by local borrowers rushing to buy back dollar before it appreciates further.
This is having a huge deflationary effect on the economies of many emerging nations.
Malaysia?s sovereign wealth fund has almost gone under after a series of bad bets against the dollar. There is thought to be another troubled dollar short coming out of Hong Kong worth $900 million.
This is forcing countries to liquidate their US Treasury Bonds to cover local losses.
Further exacerbating the situation has been the crash of the price of oil, which has turned producing countries from suppliers to takers of liquidity to the global credit markets. Russia alone sold $19 billion in the Treasury bond market in February, and is partially responsible for the sudden and dramatic rise in yields there.
The net net of all of this is to increase the risk of surprise blowups overseas, both by banks and the private borrowers. This will increase the volatility of financial instruments everywhere.
The Bank for International Settlements is an exclusive club of the world?s central banks. It is based in Basel, Switzerland, with further offices in Hong Kong and Mexico City. Its goal is it to coordinate policies among different nations.
The BIS was originally founded in 1930 to facilitate payment of German reparations following the Versailles Treaty ending WWI. As a regular groupie on the central banking scene, I have been reading the research publications for many decades.
The BIS Has Some Scary Ideas
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Featured Trade: (MARCH 18 GLOBAL STRATEGY WEBINAR), (TAKING PROFITS ON MY EURO SHORTS), (FXE), (EUO), (DXGE), (HEDGE) (ARE JUNK BONDS PEAKING?), ?(JNK), (HYG)
CurrencyShares Euro ETF (FXE) ProShares UltraShort Euro (EUO) WisdomTree Germany Hedged Equity ETF (DXGE) Hedge Inversiones SICAV (HEDGE) SPDR Barclays High Yield Bond ETF (JNK) iShares iBoxx $ High Yield Corporate Bd (HYG)
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Since the start of the year, it seems that everyone and his brother, sister and cleaning lady has been selling short the euro.
As a result, the beleaguered continental currency has suffered one of the sharpest falls in the history of the foreign exchange markets.
I have to think back three decades to recall something similar, when the Plaza Accord ignited a dramatic collapse in the US dollar against the Japanese yen, then trading at Y270.
Or you can recall back to January, when my friends at the Swiss National Bank engineered an overnight depreciation of the euro against the Swiss franc of 20%.
Those who followed my advice to sell short the euro last July have profited mightily. The (FXE) has plunged by 26% since then. Those who picked up the ProShares Ultra Short Euro 2X bear ETF (EUO) that I pleaded with you to buy did even better, capturing an eye popping 75% profit.
To read my prescient predictions about the imminent demise of the European currency, please click here for my 2015 Annual Asset Class Review.
With spectacular results like this, one has to ask whether we are seeing too much of a good thing, if this trade is getting rather long in the tooth, and if it is time to get while the getting is good.
The technical analysts certainly think so. The greenback is currently overbought and the euro oversold in the extreme, with RSI?s and momentum indicators off the charts.
For the statisticians out there, the euro?s move is 3.5 standard deviations away from the mean, something that is only supposed to happen every 100 years. And as we all know, mean reversion can be a real bitch.
On top of that, long-term market veterans will tell you that markets of all kinds naturally gravitate towards large round numbers. With the euro trading yesterday at the $1.03 handle, spitting distance from parity at $1.00, this is about as large of a round number that you will find anywhere.
So trying to catch the last three cents of a move from $1.40 to $1.00 is an awful trading idea, as the risk/reward is so poor.
My guess is that we will take a brief, peripatetic run at the $1.01 handle, and then develop a sudden case of acrophobia, or fear of heights. There will just be too many traders out there with enormous unrealized gains, begging to be exited.
I have not suddenly fallen in love with the euro. The pit from which its economy must extricate itself is deep, foreboding, and structural. But it is time to face facts. The only reason to add new euro positions here is to believe that it is going to 88 cents to the US dollar, and fast.
It could well do that. But the probability is much lower than we saw with the moves from $1.60 to $1.40 or from $1.40 to $1.03.
However, get me a decent price to sell at, like $1.08 or $1.10, and I?ll be back there again on the short side in a heartbeat.
You also must understand that the cure for a cheap euro is a cheap euro. Big continental exporters, like Daimler Benz, BMW and Volkswagen, are licking their chops at the prospects of booming sales, thanks to a newly devalued currency. Sooner or later, this will turn into robust economic growth.
If nothing else, you need to look at the Wisdom Tree Germany Hedged Equity Fund (DXGE), which will profit from this new business activity, and has already tacked on an impressive 24% in 2015. The Wisdom Tree International Hedged Equity Fund (HEDG) also looks pretty good.
As for me, I have already started planning my discount summer vacation in Europe in earnest.
Cappuccino, please!
I Remember it like it was Yesterday
The Cheap Euro Works for Me
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Featured Trade: (MAD DAY TRADER JIM PARKER IS UP 39% IN 2015), (ZIOP), (THRX), (ZTS), (DXJ), (USO), (SPY), (IWM), (FRIDAY, MAY 15 SAN FRANCISCO STRATEGY LUNCHEON) (DIAMONDS ARE STILL AN INVESTOR?S BEST FRIEND)
ZIOPHARM Oncology, Inc. (ZIOP) Theravance Inc. (THRX) Zoetis Inc. (ZTS) WisdomTree Japan Hedged Equity ETF (DXJ) United States Oil ETF (USO) SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY) iShares Russell 2000 (IWM)
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Mad Day Trader Jim Parker has been absolutely knocking the cover off the ball this year, delivering a blistering 39% profit so far for followers.
He was in and out of the Apple (AAPL) melt up twice. He was early and big in the biotechnology sector, trading around ZIOPHARM Oncology (ZIOP), Therevance (THRX), and Zoetis (ZTS).
He played the Japanese economic recovery through the Wisdom Tree Japan Hedged Equity ETF (DXJ). And for good measure, he was playing oil (USO) from the short side.
The current rapid ?RISK ON/RISK OFF? environment is tailor made for Jim?s disciplined, quantitative approach to the markets. In other words, Jim thrives on volatility.
And the best is yet to come. Jim is expecting the rest of 2015 to offer plenty of volatility and loads of great trading opportunities. He thinks the scariest moves may be yet to come.
He sees a massive rotation out of large caps (SPY) into small caps (IWM), as investors flee the adverse effects of the euro collapse on American corporate profits. That is bringing the (SPY) 200 day moving average at $199. Key support for all equity markets will be found when the NASDAQ hits 4,265.
Sector leadership could change daily, with a brutal rotation, depending on whether the price of oil is up, down, or sideways.
The market is paying the price of having pulled forward too much performance from 2015 back into the final month of 2014, when we all watched the December melt up slack jawed.
Jim is a 40-year veteran of the financial markets and has long made a living as an independent trader in the pits at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He worked his way up from a junior floor runner to advisor to some of the world?s largest hedge funds.
We are lucky to have him on our team and gain access to his experience, knowledge and expertise.
Jim uses a dozen proprietary short-term technical and momentum indicators to generate buy and sell signals.
If you are not already getting Jim?s dynamite Mad Day Trader service, please get yourself the unfair advantage you deserve. Just email Nancy in customer support at support@madhedgefundtrader.com and ask for the $1,500 a year upgrade to your existing Global Trading Dispatch service.
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Featured Trade: (WHAT ALMONDS SAY ABOUT THE GLOBAL ECONOMY), (BE CAREFUL WHO YOU SNITCH ON), (COULD YOU QUALIFY TO BECOME A US CITIZEN?)
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