Featured Trade: (FRIDAY, APRIL 3 HONOLULU, HAWAII STRATEGY LUNCHEON) (FED NOT TO RAISE INTEREST RATES IN 2015) (IWM), (DXJ), (GLD), (FXE), (FXY), (USO), (TLT), (TESTIMONIAL)
iShares Russell 2000 (IWM) WisdomTree Japan Hedged Equity ETF (DXJ) SPDR Gold Shares (GLD) CurrencyShares Euro ETF (FXE) CurrencyShares Japanese Yen ETF (FXY) United States Oil ETF (USO) iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond (TLT)
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Yes, that is the shocking truth that Fed chairman Janet Yellen told us today with the release of the central bank?s minutes.
Of course, she didn?t exactly say that she would raise interest rates for the first time in a decade in so many words. To discern that, you had to be fluent in Janetspeak.
Very few people have the slightest idea what comprises Janetspeak. It just so happens that I am quite knowledgeable in this arcane argot. In fact I can even negotiate a menu written entirely in Janetspeak and receive a meal reasonably close to what I thought I ordered.
I learned this esoteric language through private tutoring from none other than Janet Yellen herself. These I obtained while having lunch with her at the San Francisco Fed every quarter for five years.
It was a courtesy Janet extended not just to me, but to all San Francisco Bay area financial journalists. But fewer than a half dozen of us ever showed up, as monetary policy is so inherently boring, and government supplied food is never all that great. Ask any Marine.
So let me parse the words for you, the uninitiated. The Fed removed the crucial word ?patient? from its discussion. In the same breath, it says it is unlikely that rates will rise at the April meeting.
She said that any future rate rise would be conditional on continued improvement in the labor market. As the US economy is now approaching full employment, there seems to be little room for improvement there.
Now comes the vital part. Janet also said that an increase in interest rates would also be conditional on inflation returning to the Fed?s 2% inflation target!
Here?s a news flash for sports fans. Inflation is not rising. It is falling. Look no further than the price of oil, which kissed the $42 a barrel handle only this morning.
Inflation is at negative numbers in Europe and in Japan. Even the Fed?s own inflation calculation has price rises limited to 1% in 2015. Their best-case scenario does not have inflation rising to 2% until 2017 at the earliest.
Furthermore, things on the deflation front are going to get worse before they get better. Some one third of all the debt is Europe now carries negative interest rates.
Tell me about inflation when oil hits $20, which it could do in coming months, and will have a massive deflationary impact on the entire US economy, especially in Texas.
That?s the key to understanding Janet. When she says that she won?t raise rates until she sees the whites of inflations eyes, she means it.
I love the way that Janet came to this indirect decision, worthy of King Salomon himself. By taking ?patient? out of the Fed statement, she is throwing a bone to the growing number of hawks among the Fed governors.
At the same time she shatters any impact this action might have. The end result is a monetary policy that is even more dovish than if ?patient? has stayed in.
That is so Janet. No wonder she did so well as a professor at UC Berkeley, the most political institution in the world. I feel like I?m back at college.
You all might think I?m smoking something up here in the High Sierra, or that maybe a rock fell down and hit me on the head. But look at the market action. I?ll go to the video tapes.
Every asset class delivered a kneejerk reaction as if the Fed had just CUT interest rates. Stocks (IWM), bonds (TLT), the euro (FXE), the yen (FXY), OIL (USO), and gold (GLD) all rocketed. The dollar and yields dove.
This is the exact opposite of what every market participant expected, which is why the moves were so big. It is also why I went into this with a 100% cash position in my model trading portfolio.
We lost the word ?patient? we got the ?patient? result.
I had a batch of Trade Alerts cued up and ready to go expecting a dovish outcome. But it was delivered in such a left-handed fashion that I held back on the news flash. It was only when I heard the words from Janet herself that I understood exactly what was happening.
Out went the Trade Alert to buy the Russell 2000 (IWM)! Out went the Trade Alert to pick up some Wisdom Tree Japan Hedged Equity ETF (DXJ)!
Why the (IWM)? Because small caps are the American stocks least affected by a weak Euro.
Why the (DXJ)? Because the Fed action is an overwhelmingly ?RISK ON?, pro stock action. Unlike the rest if the world, the Japanese stock market has to double before it reaches new all time highs. It is just getting started.
Won?t today?s strong yen hurt the (DXJ)? Only momentarily. The Nikkei has yet to discount the breakdown from Y100 to Y120 that has already occurred, let alone the depreciation from Y120 to Y125 that is about to unfold.
Banzai!
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Janet-Yellen-e1426716631988.jpg260400Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2015-03-19 01:04:352015-03-19 01:04:35Fed Not to Raise Interest Rates in 2015
Featured Trade: (LAS VEGAS FRIDAY MAY 8 GLOBAL STRAGEGY LUNCHEON) (MAD DAY TRADER JIM PARKER KILLS IT WITH AN OIL SHORT), (USO), (HERE COMES THE NEXT PEACE DIVIDEND), (AAPL), (USO), (UUP), (TLT), (GLD), (SLV), (CU), (CORN), (SOYB) (MORE PAIN TO COME IN OIL) (USO), (XOM), (OXY), (COP), (AAL)
United States Oil ETF (USO) Apple Inc. (AAPL) PowerShares DB US Dollar Bullish ETF (UUP) iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond (TLT) SPDR Gold Shares (GLD) iShares Silver Trust (SLV) First Trust ISE Global Copper ETF (CU) Teucrium Corn ETF (CORN) eucrium Soybean ETF (SOYB) Exxon Mobil Corporation (XOM) Occidental Petroleum Corporation (OXY) ConocoPhillips (COP) American Airlines Group Inc. (AAL)
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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.
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/John-Thomas3-e1426559331128.jpg400305Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2015-03-17 01:05:502015-03-17 01:05:50Mad Day Trader Jim Parker Kills it With an Oil Short
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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