Sitting here in the Silver State of Nevada, high in the Sierras, I feel obliged to comment on a bull market of a different sort.
The Western US has found a new wrinkle in the housing collapse, where homeowners are desperately struggling to cut living costs to meet the next doubling of their adjustable rate mortgage payments on their underwater houses.
Raising horses can cost more than children, so Nevadans are turning them loose to join herds of wild mustangs, to dodge the $30,000/year it costs to board and care for these voracious animals. Local populations are exploding, eating local ranchers out of house and home, who depend on public grazing lands to feed commercial livestock.
Recently, the Bureau of Land Management held hearings on where to place 25,000 excess animals. Mustangs are the feral descendants of horses which escaped the Spanish conquistadores, and there are now thought to be 30,000 running wild, down from a 19th century peak of 2 million. The BLM has another 30,000 in pens, and is making 10,000/year available for adoption at $125/each.
The problem is that many adopt ?pets? who then flip them to Canadian slaughterhouses, which cater to the odd French taste for horseflesh. To see how this works, watch Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, and James Dean?s last film, The Misfits.
Madeleine Pickens, the wife of famed oil trader T. Boone Pickens, has offered to take the BLM?s entire herd and put them out to pasture at their exclusive ranch in Northwestern Nevada. They are now offering luxury dude ranch weekends where guests can ride out and watch herds of these wild animals, spending nights in a souped up Indian teepee (click here for her site Mustang Monument).
I have frequently run into majestic and beautiful mustang herds over the years while camping in the remote desert (no, I don?t go to Burning Man). Reminding me that there is still some ?wild? in the ?West?, I will miss them when they are gone.
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Horses-Mustangs.jpg337473Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2013-10-16 01:03:252013-10-16 01:03:25The Bull Market in Mustangs
It isn?t often when a friend of mine wins a Nobel Prize. But that?s what happened this weekend when the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the prestigious award to Yale University?s Robert Shiller. Shiller, along with Eugene Fama, and Lars Peter Hanson of the University of Chicago will share the $1.23 million cash award for their work on market pricing of assets.
Ironically, the New Haven based Shiller takes an approach that is completely the opposite of the theories propounded by his Chicago colleagues. Shiller believes that human psychology can lead to huge mispricings of assets, while Fama and Hanson argue that markets are much more efficient than that. Having spent 45 years in the financial markets myself, I think that Shiller is hands down correct. I met with Shiller last year to get his take on the long term future of our economy. He is the kind of imp like, peripatetic college professor you might expect to find in a Disney movie. Highly animated and jumping from one radical idea to the next, it is hard to keep up with his stream of consciousness torrent of economic innovations.
After a two-hour barrage, I was so intellectually exhausted that all I could do when I returned home was to plop down on the sofa with a Jack on the rocks and watch Fox News.
You know Robert Shiller as the creator of the Standard & Poors-Case Shiller Real Estate Index, which tracks 20 major residential housing markets around the US. His data was originally the domain of a handful of real estate brokers with a theoretical bent, or securitizing investment bankers. But when the real estate collapse began to accelerate in 2007, it suddenly became the data pointdu jour for every property investor, business news network, and hedge fund manager.
Shiller thinks that financial markets are so emotional that they are beyond rational analysis. The systemic vulnerability of financial markets was a major cause of the 2008 crash and is still not well understood. He argues that people should have a 100-year time horizon when making investments, because that?s how long today?s children will live. Does anyone have the trading call for the Spring of 2113? (No typo!)
He says that teaching finance today is about as popular as being the university Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) instructor during the Vietnam War. People are angry at bankers, as the Occupy Wall Street crowd has so amply shown, which Shiller sees as our own ?Arab Spring?. Since 1990, the top 1% of the wealthy have seen their net worth soar by 60%, while it has fallen for the other 99%.
When Occupiers discovered that their movement could cause governments to fall, it rapidly spilled beyond its Madrid, Spain origins. But the financial industry is not all bad. Witness the miracle in emerging markets, which has been made possible through new capital provided by western investment bankers.
Robert titillated me with some highly creative innovations, which we may see adopted in coming years. I?ll give you the highlights.
*Options on individual real estate markets, now six years old, will go mainstream and finally become liquid as individuals seek to protect their home equity during economic downturns. This will become a major area of new profits for Wall Street.
*?Continuous mortgages? should be created whereby the debt is never paid off, but is assumed from one owner to the next in exchange for a higher interest rate. If you package many of these together and securitize them, it would create far more efficient loan markets for consumers.
*The government already issues plenty of bonds, and next should sell equity in itself in one-trillionth increments. That puts the value of the government?s share price today at about $16.50. If the economy grows, the share price should go up, to the benefit of investors.
*Tax rates for the wealthy should rise with inequality. The more wealth that is concentrated with the 1%, the higher the maximum tax rate should go. Remember, the maximum rate was 90% at the time of the Roosevelt administration during the Great Depression, nearly triple today?s 39.5% rate.
*The actual impact of high frequency traders, who he refers to as ?millisecond traders?, is vastly exaggerated.
*Although the new ?crowd funding? bill has been described as the ?Boiler Room Full Employment Act?, it will provide a valuable source of venture capital for micro startups. Those earning only $40,000 a year are limited to an $800 bet, with the maximum legal investment set at $10,000.
*Some 14% of the total economic activity of the US involves security. Just having people watching people is an enormous waste of resources.
*?For profit? nonprofits, called benefit corporations, should proliferate to advance specific social goals. These should work well as they pay little in wages and enjoy community support. They are already legal in eight states.
The Nobel Prize was created by Sweden?s Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. It is believed he did so to atone for the millions who died from the military use of his product. Nobel?s original intention was to assist the mining industry. Prizes for physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace were first awarded in 1901. The prize for economics was added in 1968.
The prize has long been shrouded in controversy. Some were awarded to scientists whose theories were later disproven. Others who richly deserved prizes never got them, like Jonas Salk, the discoverer of the Salk vaccine, which wiped out polio. The Academy once considered revoking one Nobel awarded to the brilliant chemist, Fritz Haber, because he went on to invent mustard gas for the German Army in WWI. Many peace and literature prizes in recent years have had a decidedly anti-American bent to them.
Of the 835 prizes awarded to date, about 10% were to individuals at California based universities, with UC Berkeley far and away taking the lead. The Swedish Royal family was an early investor in my hedge fund. So, in 2001, the 100th anniversary of the prize, the crown princes of Sweden invited me to attend a lunch honoring the California winners, 17 of whom were living at the time. As a financial guy, I was assigned to sit next to Milton Friedman who won his economics prize in 1976. The conversation was fascinating.
If you would like to attend one of Shiller?s economics classes for free and expose yourself to more out of the box economic thinking, you can do so through regular offerings of his online courses. To sign up for Open Yale University, which Time Magazine lists as one of the top educational websites, please click the following link: http://oyc.yale.edu.
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Robert-Shiller.jpg309531Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2013-10-15 01:04:412013-10-15 01:04:41Yale?s Robert Shiller Bags Nobel Economic Prize
My annual electric bill here in sunny San Francisco comes to $4,800 a year. Since the California power authorities have set a goal of 33% alternative energy sources by 2020, PG&E (PGE) has the most aggressive green energy program in the country (click here for ?The Solar Boom in California?. More expensive solar, wind, geothermal, and biodiesel power sources mean that my electric bill may rise by $300 a year to about $5,100.
Now let?s look at my gasoline bill. Driving 15,000 miles a year, my old Toyota Highlander Hybrid used 600 gallons a year, which at $4/gallon for gas cost me $2,400/year. So my annual combined electric power/gasoline bill was $7,500.
My new Tesla Model S-1 (TSLA) will cost me $180/year in battery charges to cover the same distance. By switching to the Tesla, my total energy cost plunges to $4,980 a year, down 34%. That?s a big saving. Now you know why alternative energy is so popular in the Golden State.
There is an additional sweetener, which I?m not even counting. I also spent $1,000/year on maintenance on my old car, including tune-ups and oil changes. The Tesla will cost me nothing, as there are no oil changes or tune ups, and my engine drops from using 1,000 overcooked parts to just eleven. We?re basically talking tire rotations only for the first 100,000 miles.
There is a further enormous pay off down the road. We are currently spending $100 billion a year in cash up front fighting our wars in the Middle East, or $273 million a day! Add to that another $200 billion in back end costs, including wear and tear on capital equipment, and lifetime medical care for 5 million veterans, some of whom are severely torn up.
We import 7.5 million barrels of oil each day, or 2.7 billion barrels a year, worth $270 billion at $100/barrel (click here for the US Energy Information Agency stats). Some 2 million b/d, or 730 million barrels/year worth $60 billion comes from the Middle East. That means we are paying a de facto tax which amounts to $136/barrel, taking the true price for Saudi crude up to a staggering $219/barrel!
We are literally spending $100 billion a year so we can buy $60 billion worth of oil, and that?s not counting the lives lost. Even worse, 80% of total Persian Gulf exports now go to Asia, so we are now spending this money to assure China?s supplies, not ours. Only a government could come up with such an idiotic plan.
There is another factor to count in. Anyone in the oil industry will tell you that, of the current $100 price for crude, $30 is a risk premium driven by fears of instability in the Middle East. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, every available tanker, and thousands of rail cars are all chocked full with unwanted oil. This is why prices remain high.
The International Energy Agency says the world is now using 90 million b/d, or 32 billion barrels a year worth $3.2 trillion. This means that the risk premium is costing global consumers $960 billion/year. If we abandon that oil source, the risk premium should fall substantially, or disappear completely. What instability there becomes China?s headache, not ours.
If enough of the country converts to alternatives and adopts major conservation measures, then we can quit importing oil from that violent part of the world.? No more sending our president to bow and shake hands with King Abdullah. Oil prices would fall, our military budget would drop, the federal budget deficit would shrink, and our taxes would likely get cut.
One Tesla shrinks demand for 750 gallons of gasoline, or 1,500 gallons of oil per year. That means that we need?20.4 million?electric vehicles on the road to eliminate the need for the 2 million b/d we are importing from the Middle East. The Department of Energy has provided a $1.6 billion loan to build a Nissan Leaf plant in Smyrna, Tennessee.
Add that to the?million Chevy Volts, Tesla S-1?s, Mitsubishi iMiEV?s, and other electric cars hitting the market in the next few years. Also taking a bite out of our oil consumption are the 2 million hybrids now on the road to be joined by a third million in the next two years. That goal is not so far off.
Yes, these are simplistic, back of the envelope calculations that don?t take into account other national security considerations, or our presence on the global stage. But these numbers show that even a modest conversion to alternatives can have an outsized impact on the bigger picture.
By the way, please don?t tell Exxon Mobil (XOM) or BP (BP) I told you this. They get 80% of their earnings from importing oil to the US. I don?t want to get a knock on the door in the middle of the night.
Is This Worth It?
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/ObamaSaudi-1.jpg213320Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2013-10-15 01:03:322013-10-15 01:03:32The True Cost of Oil
Come join me for lunch at the Mad Hedge Fund Trader?s Global Strategy Update, which I will be conducting in San Francisco on Friday, November 1, 2013. An excellent meal will be followed by a wide-ranging discussion and an extended question and answer period.
I?ll be giving you my up to date view on stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities, precious metals, and real estate. And to keep you in suspense, I?ll be throwing a few surprises out there too. Tickets are available for $191.
I?ll be arriving at 11:00 and leaving late in case anyone wants to have a one on one discussion, or just sit around and chew the fat about the financial markets.
The lunch will be held at a private club in downtown San Francisco near Union Square that will be emailed with your purchase confirmation.
I look forward to meeting you, and thank you for supporting my research. To purchase tickets for the luncheons, please go to my online store.
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/San-Francisco-e1410363065903.jpg238359Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2013-10-14 08:10:002013-10-14 08:10:00November 1 San Francisco Strategy Luncheon
I am rapidly coming to the depressing conclusion that the government shutdown, now in its 15th day, is going to have a far greater impact on the economy than most economists realize. When the markets figure this out, the result for share prices could be dire, putting my entire yearend bull case at risk.
My earlier forecast was that 0.5% of GPD growth would get shaved from this quarter and then get tacked on to the next quarter (click ?Say Goodbye to the Washington Discount?). Now I am starting to wonder if the entire affair could generate a net loss of business activity.
I have been dealing with the federal government for 45 years. It is vast and often invisible, impacting our lives in a million different ways. Losing it involves a lot more than just shutting down a few national monuments. The only way to discover its true size is to close it all down, and then see where the chips fall. Falling they are, big time.
I have been keeping a tally of the countless, unforeseen ways the shutdown is affecting us. I list below some of the highpoints:
*All real estate transactions have ceased. Escrow agents can?t close deals because they are unable to independently verify social security numbers. This accounts for about one third of our current economic growth. Expect the housing numbers to be horrific for the next several months.
*All federal refinancing of home loans has stopped, about 95% of all residences bought on credit. Only the 30% purchased through all cash deals can close, but only if they can resolve the social security number problem noted above.
*US companies are about to report better than expected Q3 results, which ended on September 30. But what of the guidance going forward? Will it be based on more of the same, or a return of the Great Recession? Beats me.
*San Francisco Bay is slowly filling up with ships from Asia. Without adequate numbers of customs officials, cargos can?t be landed, leading to the layoff of longshoremen and truckers. This will play havoc with our trade figures.
*The overnight money markets have started to seize up. JP Morgan and Fidelity have ceased buying all Treasury securities with October maturities to prevent their own money market funds from going into default. As a result, annualized yields on this paper have soared from 1 basis point to 30. The consequences of this are spreading to other markets by the day.
*Both the Chinese and Japanese governments, each own about $1 trillion of Treasury securities, have already warned the US not to delay interest payments. Without their participation the yields on the ten year Treasury bond could rise as much as 100 basis points, adding $150 billion a year to America?s debt service cost.
*Half of all Air Force pilots have been grounded because they can?t maintain their flight hours. I sure hope any of our enemies aren?t contemplating a surprise attack.
*Naval ships on both coasts have had missions delayed or cancelled. That leaves tens of thousands of sailors and Marines trapped ashore. You would think this would be good for local business, but it isn?t. They don?t have any money, since they are no longer getting paid.
*The great news is that your IRS audit this week has been cancelled. This is sure the cause government revenues to fall.
*There was a great emptying out of Yosemite National Park in California. Long caravans of senior citizens driving recreational vehicles, the only campers this time of year, were evicted from their views of Half Dome and El Capitan by park rangers. Harder hit are east coast federal parks and monuments that rely on the autumn leaves for most of their annual business. For many micro economies adjacent to government facilities the Great Recession has already returned.
*Fishermen around the country are confined to port because the federal officials who monitor fishing quotas have been furloughed. The price of Dungeness crab in San Francisco is skyrocketing, as the short season could end by the time the government returns to work.
*For the first time in 200 years, the clock at the entrance to the Senate has stopped. The workers responsible for winding it were laid off.
After derisking my portfolio and chopping most of my positions last week, I felt like an idiot when markets then flew. Looks like I?ll be a dummy for only a day. With no resolution in sight this morning, the cash on my balance sheet is looking pretty damn good. That gives me more dry powder when we finally hit bottom. As I never tire of telling my readers, there is no law that says you always have to have a position.
The saddest thing is that this crisis is happening just as the economy was up shifting gears from mediocre to moderate growth. The Tea Party may end up strangling something in its crib. However, it will be not the size of the US government, but our nascent economic recovery.
Try selling that to the voters.
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Fed.-Govt-Closed.jpg349528Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2013-10-14 08:08:202013-10-14 08:08:20The Government Shutdown is Worse Than You Think
I am pleased to announce that I will be participating in the Invest like a Monster Trading Conference in San Francisco during October 25-26. The two-day event brings together experts from across the financial landscape that will improve your understanding of markets by a quantum leap and measurably boost your own personal trading performance.
Tickets are available for a bargain $399. If you buy the premium $499 package you will be invited to the Friday 6:00 pm VIP cocktail reception, where you will meet luminaries from the trading world, such as tradeMONSTRS?s Jon and Pete Najarian, Guy Adami, Jeff Mackey, and of course, myself, John Thomas, the Mad Hedge Fund Trader. All in all, it is great value for money, and I?ll personally throw in a ride on the City by the Bay?s storied cable cars for free.
Jon Najarian is the founder of optionMonster, which offers clients a series of custom crafted computer algorithms that give a crucial edge when trading the market. Called Heat Seeker ?, it monitors no less than 180,000 trades a second to give an early warning of large trades that are about to hit the stock, options, and futures markets.
To give you an idea of how much data this is, think of downloading the entire contents of the Library of Congress, about 20 terabytes of data, every 30 minutes. His firm maintains a 10 gigabyte per second conduit that transfers data at 6,000 times the speed of a T-1 line, the fastest such pipe in the civilian world. Jon?s team then distills this ocean of data on his website into the top movers of the day. ?As with the NFL,? says Jon, ?you can?t defend against speed.?
The system catches big hedge funds, pension funds, and mutual funds shifting large positions, giving subscribers a peak at the bullish or bearish tilt of the market. It also offers accurate predictions of imminent moves in single stock and index volatility.
Jon started his career as a linebacker for the Chicago Bears, and I can personally attest that he still has a handshake that?s like a steel vice grip. Maybe it was his brute strength that enabled him to work as a pit trader on the Chicago Board of Options Exchange for 22 years, where he was known by his floor call letters of ?DRJ.? He formed Mercury Trading in 1989 and then sold it to the mega hedge fund, Citadel, in 2004.
Jon developed his patented algorithms for Heat Seeker? with his brother Pete, another NFL player (Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Minnesota Vikings), who like Jon, is a regular face in the financial media.
In order to register for the conference, please click here. There you will find the conference agenda, bios of the speakers, and a picture of my own ugly mug. I look forward to seeing you there.
Cling! Cling!
Jon Najarian
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Trademonster.jpg379402Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2013-10-11 01:04:302013-10-11 01:04:30Join the ?Invest Like a Monster? San Francisco Trading Conference
You have to be impressed how Apple shares have been trading during the Washington shutdown and the debt ceiling crisis. While other highflying technology stocks have crashed and burned, Apple has held like the Rock of Gibraltar. Is this presaging much better things to come?
After the bar was set extremely low in the run up to the iPhone 5s launch, there has been an onslaught of good news. The first weekend sales came in at a staggering 9 million units, nearly double analyst forecasts. That?s a lot of units to be wrong by.
This has led to a series of broker upgrades by Cantor Fitzgerald, Cowen & Co., Piper Jaffray, Sanford Bernstein, and most recently by Jeffries. Entrenched bears are slowly an inexorably turning into bulls. Targets range up to $780.
During the summer, when the shares were trading in the low $400?s, Apple emerged as the largest buyer of its own stock. Still, it only made a dent in the $60 billion the company has dedicated to the program.
Of course, corporate raider and green mailer Carl Icahn (he lived in my building in Manhattan and was always a bit of a jerk) wants Apple to buy $160 billion of its stock, about $36% of the total market capitalization. But with a position of only $2 billion, Carl doesn?t have enough skin in the game to get anything more than a free dinner from CEO Tim Cook. Still, the more Icahn bangs the drum about the value of Apple, the more money he sucks in. His blustering has probably added about $50 to the stock price. That works for me.
Like the Origin of the Universe and the 105-year long losing streak suffered by the Chicago Cubs baseball team, the cheapness of Apple shares is one of those mysteries that baffle investors. Sure, you?d expect some natural profit taking after the meteoric 15 year run in the shares, from $4 to $707. But 46% is a lot, and many would say too much.
The company earns an eye popping net profits of $3.5 million per business hour (click here for the most recent quarterly announcement). Some one-third of it capitalization, or $150 billion, sits in cash in European bank accounts. That works out to $165 of the current $490 share price. This brings the ex cash trailing price earnings multiple down to a subterranean 11.8 times, or a 25% discount to the 16X market multiple. The dividend yield of 2.5% still exceeds that of the ten year Treasury bond. This is absurdly cheap.
Anyone who makes their living looking at the numbers has been loading up on the stock for the past eight months. Even permabear and short seller, Jim Chanos, has been buying on the theory that both Apple and competitor Samsumg together have been demolishing the Wintel architecture.
I think there is something important going on here. Apple is bringing out the next generation iPad in two weeks. Product refreshes for the iMac, Macbook, and Airbook in coming months are already well known. Every time an announcement of an announcement is made, the stock spikes $10.
But the 800-pound gorilla in Apples earnings stream is the iPhone, which accounts for more than 70% of its profits. The wildly successful 5s and 5c launches will take total smart phone sales from around 36 million in Q3 to at least 56 million units in Q4. The analyst community is nowhere near these numbers, so they are substantially underestimating the profitability of the company.
Apple has already cracked the China market for cash buyers with the latest upgrade of its wireless operating system. The whale here is a deal with China Mobile (CHL) with its 740 million customers, which has been to subject to on again and off again negations for years. Still, Apple has already told its manufacturers to add China Mobile to its approved carrier list.
I think the stock is beginning to discount pending the launch of the iPhone 6, which is still a distant 11 months away. That will take the company another generation ahead, with an expansive six-inch screen and a blazing fast A8 processor, leaving competitors in the dust. The business is so big that my favorite airline, Virgin America, has initiated nonstop service from San Francisco to Austin. I?m told the plane is always full.
All of this leads me to believe that Apple will be a major mover in 2014. The chip shot is $600, and we get a real head of steam into the iPhone 6 rollout, we could match the old high at $707. You can buy the stock here with some conform. If you are hyper aggressive, try playing the weekly call options on the next breakout. The more cautious can settle for the Technology Select Sector SPDR ETF (XLK), or the ProShares Ultra Technology 2X leveraged ETF (ROM). Apple has major weightings in both of these ETF?s.
So Where is the Power Button On This Thing?
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Gibraltar.jpg331496Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2013-10-11 01:03:242013-10-11 01:03:24Apple is Ready to Explode
Legal Disclaimer
There is a very high degree of risk involved in trading. Past results are not indicative of future returns. MadHedgeFundTrader.com and all individuals affiliated with this site assume no responsibilities for your trading and investment results. The indicators, strategies, columns, articles and all other features are for educational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice. Information for futures trading observations are obtained from sources believed to be reliable, but we do not warrant its completeness or accuracy, or warrant any results from the use of the information. Your use of the trading observations is entirely at your own risk and it is your sole responsibility to evaluate the accuracy, completeness and usefulness of the information. You must assess the risk of any trade with your broker and make your own independent decisions regarding any securities mentioned herein. Affiliates of MadHedgeFundTrader.com may have a position or effect transactions in the securities described herein (or options thereon) and/or otherwise employ trading strategies that may be consistent or inconsistent with the provided strategies.
