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.

Yes, that?s right, you read it correctly, almonds.

By now, many of you have figured out that I like calling my paid subscribers to find out how they find the service. I always ask for suggestion for improvements. Then I ask what they do besides trade the markets.

I get an amazing array of answers. One reader flew helicopters in Alaska to inspect oil pipelines, executing trades on his cell phone in between flights. Another ran a Russian hedge fund in Moscow.

The sheep farmer in Australia relied on me as his connection with the rest of the world. The family office in Spain valued my American view of the world.

Then I called Brad in Modesto, California, who said he was in the Almond business. My interest piqued, I proceeded to grill him. And with that, I obtained a fascinating insight into an obscure corner of the global economy.

If you thought marijuana, estimated by the DEA at $6 billion a year, was California?s largest cash crop, you?d be wrong. Grapes used to be our largest legal crop, at $5 billion a year. But almonds will beat all this year, possibly reaching as high at $8 billion.

You can blame the California drought, now in its fourth year. It has only rained once in the Golden State so far in 2015. This has driven the price of almonds from $1/pound a few years ago to as much as $4/pound today.

The price spike has ignited fierce water wars across the state, with increasingly desperate farmers battling over an ever-diminishing commodity. Those located in the eastern half of the Central Valley (which you will remember from your freshman English class in The Grapes of Wrath) are sitting pretty.

They have long term contracts to buy water from federal public works projects at subsidized prices that date back to the Great Depression. These rights can make or break the value of a farm, and are passed down from one generation to the next.

The Western half of the valley is another story. When construction of Interstate 5 was completed in 1979, most of it was still barren desert, a rain shadow effect of the state?s coastal mountain range.

Only the oil industry was there in force, especially around the Elk Hills oil find (watch the Daniel Day Lewis movie, There Will Be Blood). I know because my grandfather worked there for Standard Oil during the 1920?s.

So when large scale farming developed there during the eighties, they had to buy water on the spot market. The problem is that during a draught, there is very little water for sale. So parched farmers have turned to drilling to irrigate their fields.

This has lead to an even bigger headache. In the 19^th century, you could drill 100 feet and find all the water you wanted. Today, they have to go as deep as 1,200 feet, and even these ancient deep aquifers are drying up. And that?s assuming you have the $1 million it costs to drill such a well.

Indeed, the elevation of the Central Valley has fallen by ten feet over the past century because of the underground water that has been withdrawn so far. Destruction of rural buildings through catastrophic subsidence is becoming widespread.

The only alternative is to let your crops die. You see this in abundance while making the drive from San Francisco to Las Angeles, withered trees frozen in tortured, grotesque death throes. Also plentiful are irate billboards attacking the government for depriving local farmers of their cheap water.

Even if you have plenty of water, it is still not smooth sailing in the almond business these days. China is the world?s largest buyer of almonds. The demand there has been so great that the Chinese have become major buyers of almond farms throughout the state, at premium prices.

However, the Middle Kingdom?s recent anti corruption campaign is starting to take a big bite out of sales.

In years past, individuals would buy dozens of boxes of almond cookies to pass out to friends, customers, employers, government officials and regulators during the Lunar New Year celebrations. Not so today. The difference has lead to the cancellation of a few shiploads of the prized nuts.

Brad kindly invited me to tour his roasting and packaging facilities the next time I was in the neighborhood.

I was left thinking, this really is a global economy that is so integrated that, when a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, it causes a typhoon in Japan. It is also a great example of how information about one asset class can provide insights about all the others.

With that, I opened a fresh can of Blue Diamond almonds that I picked up at Costco and grabbed a handful.

Another Batch for China