Research Archives

They're Not Making Americans Anymore

You can count on a bear market hitting sometime in 2038, one falling by at least 25%.

Worse, there is almost a guarantee that a financial crisis, severe bear market, and possibly another Great Depression will take place no later than 2058 that would take the major indexes down by 50% or more.

No, I have not taken to using a Ouija board, reading tea leaves, nor examining animal entrails in order to predict the future. It can be much easier than that.

I simply read the data just released from the National Center for Health Statistics, a subsidiary of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (click here for their link).

The government agency reported that the US birth rate fell to a new all-time low for the second year in a row, to 60.2 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age. A birth rate of 125 per 1,000 is necessary for a population to break even. The absolute number of births is the lowest since 1987. In 2017, women had 500,000 fewer babies than in 2007.

These are the lowest number since WWII when 17 million men were away in the military, a crucial part of the equation.

The reason the American birth rate is such an important number is that babies grow up, or at least most of them do. In 20 years, they become consumers, earning wages, buying things, paying taxes, and generally contributing to economic growth.

In 45 years, they do so quite substantially, becoming the major drivers of the economy. When these numbers fall, recessions and bear markets occur with absolute certainty.

You have long heard me talk about the coming “Golden Age” of the 2020s. That’s when a two-decade long demographic tailwind ensues because the number of “peak spenders’ in the economy starts to balloon to generational highs. The last time this happened, during the 1980s and 1990s, stocks rose 20-fold.

Right now, we are just coming out of two decades of demographic headwind when the number of big spenders in the economy reached a low ebb. This was the cause of the Great Recession, the stock market crash and the anemic 2% annual growth since then.

The reasons for the maternity ward slowdown are many. The great recession certainly blew a hole in the family plans of many Millennials. Falling incomes always lead to lower birth rates, with many Millennial couples delaying children by five years or more. Millennial mothers are now having children later than at any time in history.

Burgeoning student debt, which just topped $1.5 trillion, is another. Many prospective mothers would rather get out from under substantial debt before they add to the population.

The rising education of women overall, a global trend, also contributes to the lag on having children. And spouses focused on career building often have a delayed interest in starting families.

Women are also delaying having children to postpone the “pay gaps” that always kicks in after they take maternity leave. Many are pegging income targets before they entertain starting families.

As a result of these trends, one in five children last year were born to women over the age of 35, a new high.

This is how some Latin American countries moved from eight to two-child families in only one generation. The same is about to take place in African countries where standards of living are rising rapidly, thanks to the eradication of several serious diseases.

The sharpest falls in the US have been with minorities. Since 2017, the birthrates for Latinos have dropped by 27% from a very high level, African Americans 11%, whites 5%, and Asian 4%.

Europe has long had the same problem with plunging growth rates but only much worse. Historically, the US has made up for the shortfall with immigration, but that is now falling, thanks the current administration policies. Restricting immigration now is a guaranty of slowing economic growth in the future. It’s just a numbers game.

So watch that growth rate. When it starts to tick up again, it’s time to buy….in about 20 years. I’ll be there to remind you with this newsletter.

As for me, I’ve been doing my part. I have five kids aged 14-34, and my life is only half over. Where did you say they keep the Pampers?

July 24, 2019/by Mad Hedge Fund Trader

The Death of the Financial Advisor

Diary, Newsletter, Research

About one-third of my readers are professional financial advisors who earn their crust of bread telling clients how to invest their retirement assets for a fixed fee.

They used to earn a share of the brokerage fees they generated. After stock commissions went to near zero, they started charging a flat 1.25% a year on the assets they oversaw.

So, it is with some sadness that I have watched this troubled industry enter a long-term secular decline that seems to be worsening by the day.

The final nail in the coffin may be the new regulations announced by the Department of Labor, at the end of the Obama administration, which controls this business.

Brokers, insurance agents, and financial planners were already held to a standard of suitability by the government, based on a client’s financial situation, tax status, investment objectives, risk tolerance, and time horizon.

The DOL proposed raising this bar to the level already required of Registered Investment Advisors, as spelled out by the Investment Company Act of 1940.

This would have required advisors to act only in the best interests of their clients, irrespective of all other factors, including the advisor’s compensation or conflicts of interest.

What this does is increase the costs while also greatly expanding advisor liability. In fact, the cost of malpractice insurance has already started to rise. All in all, it makes the financial advisor industry a much less fun place to be.

As is always the case with new regulations, they were inspired by a tiny handful of bad actors.

Some miscreants steered clients into securities solely based on the commissions they earned, which could reach 8% or more, whether it made any investment sense or not. Some of the instruments they recommended were nothing more than blatant rip-offs.

The DOL thought that the new regulations will save consumers $15 billion a year in excess commissions.

Legal action by industry associations has put the DOL proposals in limbo. Unless it appeals, it is unlikely to become law. So, there will be a respite, at least until the next administration.

Knowing hundreds of financial advisors personally, I can tell you that virtually all are hardworking professionals who go the extra mile to safeguard customer assets while earning incremental positive returns.

That is no easy task given the exponential speed with which the global economy is evolving. Yesterday’s “window and orphans” safe bets can transform overnight into today’s reckless adventure.

Look no further than coal, energy, and the auto industry. Once a mainstay of conservative portfolios, all of these sectors have, or came close to filing for bankruptcy.

Even my own local power utility, Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PGE), filed for chapter 11 in 2001 because they couldn’t game the electric power markets as well as Enron.

Some advisors even go the extent of scouring the Internet for a trade mentoring service that can ease their burden, like the Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader, to get their clients that extra edge.

Traditional financial managers have been under siege for decades.

Commissions have been cut, expenses increased, and mysterious “fees” have started showing up on customer statements.

Those who work for big firms, like UBS, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sacks, Merrill Lynch, and Charles Schwab, have seen health insurance coverage cut back and deductibles raised.

The safety of custody with big firms has always been a myth. Remember, all of these guys would have gone under during the 2008-09 financial crash if they hadn’t been bailed out by the government. It will happen again.

The quality of the research has taken a nosedive, with sectors like small caps no longer covered.

What remains offers nothing but waffle and indecision. Many analysts are afraid to commit to a real recommendation for fear of getting sued, or worse, scaring away lucrative investment banking business.

And have you noticed that after Dodd-Frank, two-thirds of a brokerage report is made up of disclosures?

Many financial advisors have, in fact, evolved over the decades from money managers to asset gatherers and relationship managers.

Their job is now to steer investors into “safe” funds managed by third parties that have to carry all of the liability for bad decisions (buying energy plays in 2014?).

The firms have effectively become toll-takers, charging a commission for anything that moves.

They have become so risk-averse that they have banned participation in anything exotic, like options, option spreads, (VIX) trading, any 2X leveraged ETF’s, or inverse ETFs of any kind. When dealing in esoterica is permitted, the commissions are doubled.

Even my own newsletter has to get compliance review before it is distributed to clients, often provided by third parties to smaller firms.

“Every year, they try to chip away at something”, one beleaguered advisor confided to me with despair.

Big brokers often hype their own services with expensive advertising campaigns that unrealistically elevate client expectations.

Modern media doesn’t help either.

I can’t tell you how many times I have had to convince advisors not to dump all their stocks at a market bottom because of something they heard on TV, saw on the Internet, or read in a competing newsletter warning that financial Armageddon was imminent.

Customers are force-fed the same misinformation. One of my main jobs is to provide advisors with the fodder they need to refute the many “end of the world” scenarios that seem to be in continuous circulation.

In fact, a sudden wave of such calls has proven to be a great “bottoming” indicator for me.

Personally, I don’t expect to see another major financial crisis until 2032 at the earliest, and by then, I’ll probably be dead.

Because of all of the above, about half of my financial advisor readers have confided in me a desire to go independent in the near future, if they are not already.

Sure, they won’t be ducking all these bullets; but at least they will have an independent business they can either sell at a future date, or pass on to a succeeding generation.

Overheads are far easier to control when you own your own business, and the tax advantages can be substantial.

A secular trend away from non-discretionary to discretionary account management is a decisive move in this direction.

There seems to be a great separating of the wheat from the chaff going on in the financial advisory industry.

Those who can stay ahead of the curve, both with the markets and their own business models, are soaking up all the assets. Those who can’t are unable to hold onto enough money to keep their businesses going.

Let’s face it, in the modern age, every industry is being put through a meat grinder. Thanks to hyper accelerating technology, business models are changing by the day.

Just be happy you’re not a doctor trying to figure out Obamacare.

Those individuals who can reinvent themselves quickly will succeed. Those who can't will quickly be confined to the dustbin of history.

It's Not As Easy As It Looks

July 24, 2019/by MHFTR

The Market Outlook for the Week Ahead, or Brace Yourself

Diary, Newsletter, Research

When you have constant jet log, you often have weird dreams. Take this morning, for example.

I dreamed that Fed governor Jay Powell invited me over to his house for breakfast. While he was cooking the bacon and eggs, Donald Trump started to call him every five minutes ordering him to lower interest rates. Jay got so distracted that the bacon caught fire, the house burned down, and we all died.

Fortunately it was only a dream. But like most dreams, parts of it were borrowed from true life.

Brace yourself, this could be the deadest, least interesting, most somnolescent week of the year. Thanks to all of those “out of office” messages we are getting with our daily newsletter mailings, I know that most of you will be out on vacation. Trading desks everywhere are now manned by “B” teams.

Then, the most important data release of the month doesn’t come out until Friday morning. It will be weak, but how weak? Q1 came in at a robust 3.1%. Q2 could be under 1%. The bigger unknown is how much of this widely trumpeted slowdown is already in the market?

Given the elevated levels of stock markets everywhere, most traders will rather be inclined to bet on which of two flies crawls up a wall faster. Such are the dog days of summer.

We here in Europe are bracing for the next ratchet up in climate change, where every temperature record is expected to be broken. It is forecast to hit 92 in London, 106 in Paris, and 94 in Berlin. Still, that's a relief from India, where it was 120. Five more years of global warming and India will lose much of its population as it will become uninhabitable.

I shall have to confine my Alpine climbing to above 8,000 feet where hopefully it can reach the 70s. By the way, the air conditioning in Europe sucks, and the bars always run out of ice early.

While the Fed is expected by all to cut interest rates a quarter point next week, we have suddenly received a raft of strong economic data points hinting that it may do otherwise.

Inflation hit an 18-month high, with the CPI up a blistering 0.3% in June. That’s why bonds (TLT) took a sudden four-point hit. Soaring prices for apparel (the China trade war), used cars, rents, and healthcare costs led the charge. Is this the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning?

The Empire State Factory Index hits a two-year high, leaping from -8.6 in June to 4.3 in July. No recession here, at least in New York.

Microsoft (MSFT) blew it away, with spectacular Q2 earnings growth, wiping out conservative analyst forecasts. Azure, the company’s cloud business, rose a spectacular 64%. Nothing like seeing your number one stock pick for 2019 take on all comers. Buy (MSFT) on every dip.

An early read on Q2 GDP came in at a sizzling 1.8%. Many forecasts were under 1%, thanks to the trade wars, soaring budget deficits, and fading tax revenues. That’s still well down from the 3.1% seen in Q1. It seems no one told Main Street, where retail sales and borrowing are on fire, according to JP Morgan’s Jamie Diamond.

US Retail Sales rose a hot 0.4% in June, raising prospects that the Fed may not cut interest rates after all. Stocks and bonds both got hit. Don’t panic yet, it’s only one number.

If the Fed only looks at the data above, it would delay a rate cut for another quarter. If they choose that option, the Dow Average would plunge 1,000 points in a week. The market-sensitive Fed knows this too.

However, the Fed has to be maintaining a laser-like focus on the Conference Board Index of Leading Economic Indicators, which lately have been rolling over like the Bismarck and always presage a recession. For your convenience, I have included a 60-year chart below with the recessions highlighted.

And there were a few soft spots in the numbers as well.

China growth slowed to 6.2%, a 27-year low. Never mind that the real rate is probably only 3%. The slowdown is clearly the outcome of the trade war. That’s what happens when you make war on your largest customer. Markets rallied because it was not worse.

Banks beat on earnings, but stocks yawned, coming off an “OK” quarter. It’s still the sector to avoid with a grim backdrop of sharply falling interest rates. They’re also getting their pants beat by fintech, from which there is no relief.

There is no end to the China trade war in sight, as Trump once again threatened another round of tariff increases. It looks like the trade war will outlast the presidential election, since the Chinese have no interest in helping Trump get reelected. The puzzle is that the stock market could care less.

Trump’s war on technology expanded. First, Facebook (FB) got hit with a $5 fine over privacy concerns. Now Google (GOOGL) is to be investigated for treason for allegedly helping the Chinese military. In the meantime, Europe is going after Amazon (AMZN) on antitrust concerns. If the US isn’t going to dominate technology, who will. Sorry, but this keyboard doesn’t have Chinese characters.

June US Housing Starts fell 0.9%, while permits dove 6%. If builders won’t build in the face of record low interest rates, their outlook for the economy must be grim. Maybe the 36% YOY decline in buying from Chinese has something to do with it.

Oil popped on the US downing of an Iranian drone in the Straits of Hormuz, which I flew over myself only last week on my way to Abu Dhabi. Expect this tit for tat, “Phony War” to continue, making Texas tea (USO) untradeable. In the meantime, the International Energy Agency has cut oil demand forecasts, thanks to a slowing global economy.

My strategy of avoiding stocks and only investing in weak dollar plays like bonds (TLT), foreign exchange (FXA), and copper (FCX) has been performing well. After spending a few weeks out of the market, it’s amazing how clear things become. The clouds lift and the fog disperses.

My Global Trading Dispatch has hit a new high for the year at +17.78% and has earned a respectable 2.54% so far in July. Nothing like coming out of the blocks for an uncertain H2 on a hot streak.

My ten-year average annualized profit bobbed up to +33.12%. With the markets now in the process of peaking out for the short term, I am now 70% in cash with Global Trading Dispatch and 100% cash in the Mad Hedge Tech Letter. If there is one thing supporting the market now, it is the fact that my Mad Hedge Market Timing Index has pulled back to a neutral 44. It’s a Goldilocks level, not too hot and not too cold.

The coming week will be a fairly sedentary one on the data front after last week’s fireworks, except for one big bombshell on Friday.

On Monday, July 22, the Chicago Fed National Activity Index is published.

On Tuesday, July 23, we get a new Case Shiller National Home Price Index. June Existing Home Sales follow.

On Wednesday, July 24, June New Home Sales are released.

On Thursday, July 25 at 8:30 AM EST, the Weekly Jobless Claims are printed. So are June Durable Goods.

On Friday, July 26 at 8:30 AM EST, we get the most important release of the week, the advance release of US Q2 GDP. The numbers are expected to be weak, and anything above 1.8% will be a surprise, compared to 3.1% in Q1. Depending on the number, the market will either be up big, down big, or flat. I can already hear you saying “Thanks a lot.”

The Baker Hughes Rig Count follows at 2:00 PM.

As for me, I’ll be attending a fund raiser tonight for the Zermatt Community band held in the main square in front of St. Mauritius church. If you don’t ski, there isn’t much to do in the winter here but practice your flute, clarinet, French horn, or tuba.

We’ll be eating all the wurst, raclete, beer, and apple struddle we can. As an honorary citizen of Zermatt with the keys to the city, having visited here for 51 years, I get to attend for free.

Good luck and good trading.

John Thomas
CEO & Publisher
The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader

Mad Hedge Market Timing Index

July 22, 2019/by Mad Hedge Fund Trader

What’s Happened to Apple?

Diary, Newsletter, Research

One of the great mysteries of the tech world has at last been answered.

Apple’s brand new spaceship-designed headquarter, one of the world’s most valuable buildings, has finally had a value put on it.

New figures released this week show the tech giant’s circular headquarters in Cupertino, CA was assessed at a breathtaking $3.6 billion by Santa Clara County for property tax purposes. The valuation doesn’t perfectly coincide with its market value — how much it would sell for — but is based off a detailed appraisal of the building, which opened in 2017.

If you include computers, furniture, and even farm equipment to take care of the property’s abundant peach trees, the figure rises to $4.17 billion for the fiscal year that ended in June, the assessor’s office said.

Beyond its giant 2.8 million-square-foot size, Apple Park’s high-end materials, abundant glass, and intricate design make it a standout in Silicon Valley. The building is so big it even has its own weather.

Unfortunately, the share prices of companies that spend billions on flashy new designer headquarters do not have a great history. Ride around Manhattan in an Uber cab and you’ll quickly understand that time has not been kind to the extravagant: the Chrysler Building, the Pan Am Building, and the AT&T building to name just a few.

Citicorp’s HQ, with its horizon-defining slant-edged roof, is still in business, but the stock is still down 75% from its pre-crash high. Is Apple headed in the same direction?

Looking at the share price performance of the past year, which has been zero, you might be forgiven for thinking so. Other tech stocks have risen by 50% or more during the same period.

Apple Park is among the world’s dozen most expensive buildings despite its relatively modest four-storey height.

America’s tallest spire, the 1,776-foot One World Trade Center in New York, cost $3.9 billion to build according to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey which owns the building and has 3.5 million square feet. Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands resort reportedly topped $5 billion in costs, while Finland’s Olkiluoto 3 nuclear reactor exceeded $6 billion.

Saudi Arabia’s holy city of Mecca is home to two of the most valuable buildings in the world: the $15 billion Abraj Al Bait Towers and the $100 billion Great Mosque of Mecca.

Apple Park was assessed at more than twice the amount of Salesforce Tower, San Francisco’s tallest building, which was valued at $1.7 billion by San Francisco. Salesforce Tower has about half as much office space as Apple Park despite being 57 stories taller.

With property taxes in Santa Clara County running around 1.25%, Apple would owe around $50 million annually.

The building is a manageable expense for Apple’s profit machine. In its most recent quarter, Apple reported a mind-numbing $58 billion in revenue and $11.5 billion in net income.

Apple was Santa Clara County’s largest property taxpayer for the 2017-18 fiscal year, with $56 million in taxes paid.

Investors have been frustrated with Apple’s recent performance, although it did make back most of the 40% hickey it suffered last fall.

Its business plan seems well on track, shifting from a hardware company to one that focuses on software and services. If anything, the shift has been taking place faster than expected, with the cloud, iTunes, Apple Wallet, Apple Care, the App Store, and other services accounting for a growing share of earnings.

All will become clear when the company announces their Q3 earnings on Tuesday, July 30 after the stock market close.

No, I think the problem with Apple is that it is suffering from the China Disease. Employing a million people who produce 225 million iPhones a year, Apple is the preeminent hostage in the US-China trade dispute. That, undoubtedly, has been a dead weight on the shares.

However, after covering this field for half a century, I can tell that trade wars start, trade wars play out, and trade wars end. Unlike other trade wars, this one has a specific end date. That would be on Wednesday, January 20, 2021, or in 18 months, the date of the next presidential inauguration.

As for me, I am waiting to upgrade my current iPhone X until it includes 5G wireless technology early next year. I bet 225 million others are as well. Dump the trade war and Apple shares could rocket up towards my old long-term target of $250 a share in a heartbeat.

By the way, there is one other headquarter that may be about to join the dustbin of history. That would be 725 Fifth Avenue, NY, NY 10022, which has been appraised at a mere $371 million and carries a hefty $100 million in debt. In is now partly owned by the US Justice Department, which will soon sell its stake.

Locals know it as Trump Tower.

July 19, 2019/by Mad Hedge Fund Trader

The Insider's View on the Future of Technology

Diary, Newsletter, Research

How would you like to learn the latest, most important technology trends hitting the global economy today, prepared by one of the most knowledgeable and experienced people in the industry?

It's very simple. Just click on the link below for a wrist-breaking .pdf file packed with 360 slides. It was prepared by my old friend and former Morgan Stanley colleague, Mary Meeker.

Meeker gained fame as the legendary investment banker for technology issues during the Dotcom Boom. She brought to market such blockbusters as Netscape. She also piled investors very early into Amazon (AMZN), Google (GOOG), Dell Computer (DELL), Microsoft (MSFT), and eBay (EBAY) when many of these stocks were trading at single-digit prices. You can understand why she is so popular.

Since 2010, Mary has been with the leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. She initially prepared Internet Trends 2018 as a broad ranging 50,000-foot view of technology for her firm. It has since been presented at a number of conferences.

Depending on your interest in technology, you may want to just quickly scroll through the report or analyze each and every single slide. Each slide is a gold mine of information for geeks such as myself. I list a few sample ones below.

The report also gives you some indication of the deep research in which the Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader and the Mad Hedge Technology Letter engage to get you winning Trade Alerts.

To download the report in full please click here.

Enjoy.

July 11, 2019/by MHFTR

Notice to Military Subscribers

Diary, Newsletter, Research

To the dozens of subscribers in Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, and the surrounding ships at sea, thank you for your service!

I think it is very wise to use your free time to read my letter and learn about financial markets in preparation for an entry into the financial services when you muster out.

And if Donald Trump gets his way with a 10% rise in defense spending and a 30% cut in the State Department budget, it looks like there are going to be a lot more of you abroad to take advantage of my services.

Nobody is going to call you a baby killer and shun you, as they did when I returned from Southeast Asia four decades ago. In fact, employers have been given fantastic tax breaks and other incentives to hire you.

I have but one request. No more subscriptions with .mil addresses, please. The Defense Department, the CIA, the NSA, Homeland Security, and the FBI do not look kindly on private newsletters entering the military network, even the investment kind.

If you think civilian spam filters are tough, watch out for the military kind! And no, I promise that there are no secret messages embedded with the stock tips. “BUY” really does mean “BUY.” “Sell” means “Sell” too.

If I did not know the higher ups at these agencies, as well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I might be bouncing off the walls in a cell at Guantanamo by now wearing an orange jumpsuit.

It also helps that many of the mid-level officers at these organizations have made a fortune with their meager government retirement funds following my advice. All I can say is that if the Baghdad Stock Exchange ever become liquid, I'm going to own it.

Where would you guess the greatest concentration of readers of The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader is found? New York? Nope. London? Wrong. Chicago? Not even close.

Try a ten-mile radius centered on Langley, Virginia, by a large margin.

The funny thing is, half of the subscribing names coming in are Russian. I haven't quite figured that one out yet.

Did we hire the entire KGB at the end of the cold war? If we did, it was a great move. Those guys were good. That includes you, Yuri.

So keep up the good work, and fight the good fight. But please, only subscribe to my letter with personal Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail addresses. That way my life can become a lot more boring.

Oh, and by the way, Langley, you're behind on your bill. Please pay up, pronto, and I don't want to hear whining about any damn budget cuts!

I Want My Mad Hedge Fund Trader!

July 9, 2019/by Mad Hedge Fund Trader

Where The Economist "Big Mac" Index Finds Currency Value

Diary, Newsletter, Research

My former employer, The Economist, once the ever-tolerant editor of my flabby, disjointed, and juvenile prose (Thanks Peter and Marjorie), has released its "Big Mac" index of international currency valuations.

Although initially launched as a joke three decades ago, I have followed it religiously and found it an amazingly accurate predictor of future economic success.

The index counts the cost of McDonald's (MCD) premium sandwich around the world, ranging from $7.20 in Norway to $1.78 in Argentina, and comes up with a measure of currency under and over valuation.

What are its conclusions today? The Swiss franc (FXF), the Brazilian real, and the Euro (FXE) are overvalued, while the Hong Kong dollar, the Chinese Yuan (CYB), and the Thai baht are cheap.

I couldn't agree more with many of these conclusions. It's as if the august weekly publication was tapping The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader for ideas.

I am no longer the frequent consumer of Big Macs that I once was as my metabolism has slowed to such an extent that in eating one, you might as well tape it to my ass. Better to use it as an economic forecasting tool than a speedy lunch.

The Big Mac in Yen is Definitely Not a Buy

July 5, 2019/by MHFTR

Why US Bonds Love Chinese Tariffs

Diary, Newsletter, Research

For many, one of the most surprising impacts of the administration’s tariffs on Chinese imports announced today has been a rocketing bond market.

Since the December $116 low, the iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF (TLT) has jumped by a staggering $16 points, the largest move up so far in years.

The tariffs are a highly regressive tax that will hit consumers hard in the pocketbook, thus reducing their purchasing power.

It will dramatically slow US economic growth. If the trade war escalates, and it almost certainly will, it could shrink US GDP by as much as 1% a year. A weaker economy means less demand for money, lower interest rates, and higher bond prices.

There is no political view here. This is just basic economics.

And while there has been a lot of hand-wringing over the prospect of China dumping its $1.1 trillion in American bond holdings, it is unlikely to take action here.

The Beijing government isn’t going to do anything to damage the value of its own investments. The only time it actually does sell US bonds is to support its own currency, the renminbi, in the foreign exchange markets.

What it CAN do is to boycott new Treasury bond purchases, which it already has been doing for the past year.

The tariffs also raise a lot of uncertainty about the future of business in the United States. Companies are definitely not going to increase capital spending if they believe a depression is coming, which the last serious trade war during the 1930s greatly exacerbated.

While stocks despise uncertainty, bonds absolutely love it.

Those of you who are short the bond market through the ProShares Ultra Short 20+ Year Treasury ETF (TBT) have a particular problem that is often ignored.

The cost of carry of this fund is now more than 5% (two times the 2.10% coupon plus management fees and expenses). Thus, long-term holders have to see interest rates rise by more than 5% a year just to break even. The (TBT) can be a great trade, but a money-losing investment.

The Chinese, which have been studying the American economic and political systems very carefully for decades, will be particularly clever in its retaliation. And you thought all those Chinese tourists were over here just to buy our Levi’s?

It will target Republican districts with a laser focus, and those in particular who supported Donald Trump. It wants to make its measures especially hurt for those who started this trade war in the first place.

First on the chopping block: soybeans, which are almost entirely produced in red states. In 2016, the last full year for which data is available, the US sold $15 billion worth of soybeans to China. Which are the largest soybean producing states? Iowa followed by Minnesota.

A major American export is aircraft, some $131 billion in 2017, and China is overwhelmingly the largest buyer. The Middle Kingdom needs to purchase 1,000 aircraft over the next 10 years to accommodate its burgeoning middle class. It will be easy to shift some of these orders to Europe’s Airbus Industries.

This is why the shares of Boeing (BA) have been slaughtered recently, down some 13.5% from the top. While Boeing planes are assembled in Washington state, they draw on parts suppliers in all 50 states.

Guess what the biggest selling foreign car in China is? The General Motors (GM) Buick which saw more than 400,000 in sales last year. I have to tell you that it is hilarious to see my mom’s car driven up to the Great Wall of China. Where are these cars assembled? Michigan and China.

The global trading system is an intricate, finally balanced system that has taken hundreds of years to evolve. Take out one small piece, and the entire structure falls down upon your head.

This is something the administration is about to find out.

July 5, 2019/by MHFTR

Here Comes the Next Biotech Revolution

Diary, Newsletter, Research

Technology and biotechnology are the two seminal investment themes of this century.

And while many tech companies have seen share prices rise 100-fold or more since the millennium, biotech and its parent big pharma have barely moved the needle.

That is about to change.

You can thank the convergence of big data, supercomputing, and the sequencing of the human genome, which overnight, have revolutionized how new drugs are created and brought to market.

So far, only a handful of scientists and industry insiders are in on the new game. Now it’s your turn to get in on the ground floor.

The first shot was fired in December 2017 when CVS (CVS) bought Aetna (AET) for an eye-popping $69 billion, puzzling analysts. A flurry of similar health care deals followed, with Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A), Amazon (AMZN) with its Verily start-up, and J.P. Morgan (JPM) joining the fray.

March followed up with a Cigna (CI) bid for Express Scripts, a pharmacy benefits manager. Apple (AAPL) has suddenly launched a bunch of healthcare-based apps designed to accumulate its own health data pool.

What’s it all about? Or better yet, is there a trade here?

No, it’s not a naked bid for market share, or an attempt to front run the next change in health care legislation. It’s much deeper than that.

In short, it’s all about you, or your personal data to be more precise.

We have all seen those clever TV ads about IBM's (IBM) Watson supercomputer knowing what you want before you do. In reality, we are now on the third generation of Watson, known as Summit, the world’s fastest super computer. By the way, Summit uses thousands of NVIDIA (NVDA) graphics cards, which is yet another reason why I love that company.

Summit can process a mind-numbing 4 quadrillion calculations per second. This is the kind of computing muscle power that you once associated with a Star Trek episode.

Financed by the Department of Defense to test virtual nuclear explosions and predict the weather (that’s why we signed the nuclear test ban treaty), Summit has a few other tricks up its sleeve.

It can, for example, store every human genome and medical record of all 330 million people in the United States, process that data instantly, and spit out miracle drugs to cure any disease almost at whim.

You know all those lab tests, X-rays, MRI scans, and other tests you’ve been accumulating over the years? They add up to some 30% of the world daily data creation, or some 4 petabytes (or 4 million gigabytes) a day. That’s a lot of zeroes and ones.

Up until a couple of years ago, this data just sat there. It was like having a copy of the Manhattan telephone book (if it still exists) but not knowing anyone there. Thanks to Summit, we now not only have a few friends in Manhattan, we know everyone’s most intimate personal details.

I have been telling readers for years that if you can last only 10 more years, you might be able to live forever as all major human diseases will be cured during this time. Summit finally gives us the tools to achieve this.

Imagine the investment implications!

The U.S. currently spends more than $3 trillion on health care, or about 15% of GDP, and costs are expected to rise another 6% this year. To modernize this market, you will need to create from scratch four more Apples or six more Facebooks (FB) in terms of market capitalization. You can imagine what getting in early is potentially worth to your investment portfolio.

Crucial to all of this was Craig Venter’s decoding of his own DNA in 2000 for the first time which cost about $1 billion. Today, you and I can get 23andMe, Ancestry.com, or Family Tree DNA to do it for $100, with most of the scut work done in China.

Of course, key to all of this is getting the medical data for every U.S. citizen on line as fast as possible. The Obama administration began this effort seven years ago. Remember those gigantic overstuffed records rooms at your doctor’s office? They’ve all been sent to the recycling bin. You don’t see them anymore.

But we have a long way to go, and 20% of the U.S. population who don’t have HAVE any medical records, including all of the uninsured, will be a challenge.

To give you some idea of the potential and convince you that I have not gone totally MAD, let me tell you about Amgen’s (AMGN) sudden interest in the country of Iceland. Yes, Iceland.

There, a struggling young start-up named deCode sequenced the DNA of the entire population of the country, about 160,000 individuals. It tried to monetize its findings, but it was early and lost money hand over fist. So, the company sold it to Amgen in 2012 for $415 million.

Until then, targeting molecules for development was based on a hope and a prayer, and only a hugely uneconomic 5% of drugs made it to market. I was a bit like wildcatting for oil, another extremely high risk venture.

Using artificial intelligence (yes, those NVIDIA graphics processors again) to pretest against the deCode DNA database, it was able to increase that hit rate to 75%.

It’s not a stretch to assume that a 15-fold increase in success rates leads to a 15-fold improvement in profitability, or thereabouts.

Word leaked out setting off a gold rush for equivalent data pools that led to the takeover boom described above. And what happens when the pool of data explodes from 160,000 individuals to 330 million? It boggles the mind.

Another aspect of this is that Iceland has the purest gene pool in the world. Some 90% of the population is directly descended from Vikings, while the remaining 10% is from the Irish slaves they captured.

As a result, the health care industry is now benefiting from a “golden age” of oncology. Average life expectancy for chemotherapies is increasing by months at a time for specific cancers.

All of this is happening at a particularly fortuitous time for drug, health care, and biotech companies, which are only just now coming out of a long funk.

Traders seemed to have picked up on this new trend in May, which is why I slapped on a long position in the iShares Nasdaq Biotechnology ETF (IBB) (click here for a full description).

Like many companies in the sector, it is coming off of a very solid one-year double bottom and is going ballistic today.

The area is ripe for rotation. Other names you might look at include Biogen (BIIB), Celgene (CELG), and Regeneron (REGN).

If you have grown weary of buying big cap technology stocks at new all-time highs, try adding a few biotech and pharmaceutical stocks to spice this up. The results may surprise you.

As for living forever, that will be the subject of a future research piece. The far future.

July 2, 2019/by Mad Hedge Fund Trader

Onshoring Takes Another Great Leap Forward

Diary, Newsletter, Research

Have you tried to hire a sewing machine operator lately?

I haven’t, but I have friends running major apparel companies who have (where do you think I get all those tight-fitting jeans?).

Guess what? There aren’t any to be had.

Since 1990, some 77% of the American textile workforce has been lost, when China joined the world economy in force, and the offshoring trend took flight.

Now that manufacturing is, at last, coming home, the race is on to find the workers to man it.

Welcome to onshoring 2.0.

The development has been prompted by several seemingly unrelated events.

There is an ongoing backlash to several disasters at garment makers in Bangladesh, the current low-cost producer which have killed thousands.

Today’s young consumers want to look cool but have a clean conscience as well. That doesn’t happen when your threads are sewn together by child slave laborers working for $1 a day.

Several firms are now tapping into the high-end market where the well-off are willingly paying top dollar for a well-made “Made in America” label.

Look no further than 7 For All Mankind, which is offering just such a product at a discount to all recent buyers of the Tesla Model S-1 (TSLA), that other great all-American manufacturer.

As a result, wages for cut-and-sew jobs are now among the fastest growing in the country, up 13.2% in real terms since 2007, versus a paltry 1.4% for the industry as a whole.

Apparel industry recruiters are plastering high schools and church communities with flyers in their desperate quest for new workers.

They advertise in languages with high proportions of blue-collar workers, such as Spanish, Somali, and Hmong.

New immigrants are particularly being targeted. And yes, they are resorting to the technology that originally hollowed out their industry, creating websites to suck in new applicants.

Chinese workers now earn $3 an hour versus $9 plus benefits at the lowest paying U.S. factories.

But the extra cost is more than made up for by savings in transportation and logistics, and the rapid time to market.

That is a crucial advantage in today’s fast-paced, high-turnover fashion world. Some companies are even returning to the hiring practices of the past, offering free training programs and paid internships.

By now, we have all become experts in offshoring, the practice whereby American companies relocate manufacturing jobs overseas to take advantage of low wages, missing unions, the lack of regulation, and the paucity of environmental controls.

The strategy has been by far the largest source of new profits enjoyed by big companies for the past two decades.

It has also been blamed for losses of U.S. jobs, with some estimates reaching as high as 25 million.

When offshoring first started 50 years ago, it was a total no-brainer.

Wages were sometimes 95% cheaper than those at home. The cost savings were so great that you could amortize your total capital costs in as little as two years.

So American electronics makers began filing overseas to Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and the Philippines.

After the U.S. normalized relations with China in 1978, the action moved there and found that labor was even cheaper.

Then, a funny thing happened. After 30 years of falling real American wages and soaring Chinese wages, offshoring isn’t such a great deal anymore. The average Chinese laborer earned $100 a year in 1977.

Today, it is $6,000, and $26,000 for trained technicians, with total compensation still rising 20% a year. At this rate, U.S. and Chinese wages will reach parity in about 10 years.

But wages won’t have to reach parity for onshoring to accelerate in a meaningful way. Investing in China is still not without risks.

Managing a global supply chain is no piece of cake on a good day. Asian countries still lack much of the infrastructure that we take for granted here.

Natural disasters such as earthquakes, fires, and tidal waves can have a hugely disruptive impact on a manufacturing system that is in effect a highly tuned, incredibly complex watch.

There are also far larger political risks keeping a chunk of our manufacturing base in the Middle Kingdom than most Americans realize. With the U.S. fleet and the Chinese military playing an endless game of chicken off the coast, we are one midair collision away from a major diplomatic incident.

Protectionism constantly threatens to boil over in the U.S., whether it is over the dumping of chicken feet, tires, or the latest, solar cells.

This is what the visit to the Foxconn factory by Apple’s CEO Tim Cook was all about. Be nice to the workers there, let them work only 8 hours a day instead of 16, let them unionize, and guess what?

Work will come back to the U.S. all the faster. The Chinese press was ripe with speculation that Apple-induced reforms might spread to the rest of the country like wildfire.

The late General Motors (GM) CEO Dan Adkerson once told me his company was reconsidering its global production strategy in the wake of the Thai floods.

Which car company was most impacted by the Japanese tsunami? General Motors, which obtained a large portion of its transmissions there.

The impact of a real onshoring move on the U.S. economy would be huge. Some economists estimate that as many as 10% to 30% of the jobs lost to offshoring could return.

At the high end, this could amount to 8 million jobs. That would cut our unemployment rate down by half, at least.

It would add $20 billion to $60 billion in GDP per year or up to 0.4% in economic growth per year.

It would also lead to a much stronger dollar, rising stocks, and lower bond prices. Is this what the stock market is trying to tell us by failing to have any meaningful correction for the past 2 ½ years?

Who would be the biggest beneficiaries of an onshoring trend? Si! Ole! Mexico (UMX) (EWW), which took the biggest hit when China started soaking up all the low-wage jobs in the world.

After that, the industrial Midwest has to figure pretty large, especially gutted Michigan. With real estate prices there under their 1992 lows, if there is a market at all, you know that doing business there costs a fraction of what it did 20 years ago.

So How Does This Thing Work?

May 29, 2019/by MHFTR

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