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The Market Outlook for the Week Ahead, or Goldilocks is Back!

After a three-week vacation, sanity has returned.

In a mere 15 trading days, the stock market has leaped from “the end of the financial system as we know it” to “happy days are here again.”

It was a week that brought us a major recovery of domestic cyclicals, with banks and commodities leading and technology bringing up the rear. Market breadth is broadening and winners are outnumbering losers. The Volatility Index ($VIX) completed a round trip, from $19 to $31, then back down again to $19.

Trading volumes of banks have plummeted 90% from their peaks. The Russell 2000 was the top gaining index of the week, which is 25% made up of small financials.

I’ve always been a numbers guy and to me, hard data rules all. Earnings that were widely expected to be terrible because of the coming recession are coming in better than expected. The actual fact is that the US economy is growing at a 2.5% annualized rate, slightly below the long-term average of 3%.

No recession here!

Last week, we learned the harsh reality of the Silicon Bank failure in congressional hearings. Once venture capitalist Peter Theil started the rumors, the bad news spread like wildfire. That day, some $40 billion left the bank, withdrawn instantly through the bank’s convenient cell phone app. The next day, $100 billion was scheduled for withdrawal….which the bank didn’t have.

There was no pleading from Mr. Potter to leave your cash in the bank to help the broader community. The money left with the speed of light. If Janet Yellen had not stepped in to guarantee deposits, every small bank in the country would have been cleaned out of cash the following week.

It makes one worry about what other manifestations of modern technology our financial system is unable to cope with. AI maybe, the development of which Elon Musk called for a halt to ensure our own survival. Maybe that was AI at work at (SVB)?

I am happy to say that Mad Hedge clocked the best month in two years, up +20.85%. Every time I do this, people ask me how. Here are a few key points that were screaming at me on meltdown day on Monday, March 13, when I loaded the boat with bank stocks, call spreads, and LEAPS.

1) Trading volume in banks rose tenfold
2) All banks were being dumped indiscriminately, with the best dropping as fast as the worst
3) Some 90% of stocks were down on the day. It was a classic one-way day.
4) Key technical levels in the S&P 500 held at $3,750
5) The Volatility Index spiked to $31
6) The usual merchants of doom appeared on TV and predicted the end of the world so they could buy stocks cheaper

When the sun, moon, and planets align, I strike. The market doesn’t ask twice.

Most importantly, having spent seven days a week for 55 years studying the fundamentals and the market, I knew they in no way justified the magnitude of the crash we were getting. What the market was really giving us was a gift, the best quality stocks at huge discounts. Whenever the market offers you a gift, you take it.

I did with both hands.

I went into this crash with 80% cash, a great position of strength. That comes from not overtrading, chasing marginal trades, or taking on positions because there is nothing else to do, all beginner mistakes and own goals. I live by the philosophy that a dollar at a market top is worth $10 at a market bottom. That was certainly the case this time.

It also helped that I know the Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen well, as I was once one of her students at UC Berkeley. I was in regular contact with her office the weekend Silicon Valley crash happened, and I knew she would do the right thing.

She did.

Every time we get one of these events, Mad Hedge followers make about 20%. This time was no different.

March closed out at +20.85%. My 2023 year-to-date performance is now at an incredible +46.62%. The S&P 500 (SPY) is up a miniscule +7.73% so far in 2023. My trailing one-year return maintains a sky-high +104.40% versus -22.75% for the S&P 500.

That brings my 15-year total return to +643.81%, some 2.80 times the S&P 500 (SPY) over the same period. My average annualized return has recovered to +48.29%, another new high.

I executed only three trades last week, taking profits on my bond short (TLT) and rolling it into a new long bond position, and buying Freeport McMoRan (FCX).

Silicon Valley Bank Sells to First Citizens Bancshares (FCNCA), whose shares rocketed by an incredible 72% on the news. First Citizens is buying about $72 billion worth of SVB assets from the FDIC at a discount of $16.5 billion. The FDIC gave (FCNCA) an unheard-of $70 billion line of credit to do the deal. (SVB) management sold $84 million worth of stock in the two years leading up to the bankruptcy, including $3 million by the CEO, which will almost certainly get clawed back. It certainly doesn’t pass the smell test.

Q4 GDP Comes in at 2.6% and is likely to continue at the same rate in Q1. A solid Christmas selling season was a big help. Someone forgot to tell the economy it was supposed to be in a recession. That’s down from 3.2% in Q3 2022. Maybe this is why stocks won’t go down?

Commercial Real Estate is in Trouble, says JP Morgan, falling 37% last year on a total return basis. Those pressures are set to mount as commercial real estate, already dealing with higher interest rates and fewer workers showing up at offices, deals with the regional banking fallout.

Manhattan Office Vacancies Hit Record High, a victim of the work-from-home trend and fears of a coming recession. More than 16% of a total of 470 million square feet was empty in Q1. Average rents are flat at $76.96 a square foot.

Home Ownership Premium Highest Since 2006, when compared to rentals. The spread assumes a new homeowner took out a mortgage yesterday, which few have. That’s up 71% in three years compared to annual rental growth of 6.3%. The failure of home prices to drop is part of the problem, which they won’t with a 10 million unit national structural shortage.

Europe Bans Internal Combustion Engines, from 2035. An exemption was allowed for German cars that run on carbon-neutral fuels, like hydrogen. Half of the world’s oil demand is about to disappear.

A Severe Short Squeeze in Copper is Developing, leading to a massive price spike later in 2023. A Chinese economic recovery and exploding EV growth are the reasons. Copper is the only industrial metal up this year, some 6%. The rest are all down on recession fears. Is the red metal now recession-proof? Buy (FCX) on Dips.

Lithium Prices Have Dropped by Half, in the past four months, following a ballistic 1,300% price increase in the previous two years. Australia is the world’s largest producer of lithium. China and Chile follow, thanks to cheap labor, lax regulation, and lack of environmental controls.

Alibaba to Break Up into six different companies, which may independently list sometime in the future. Such a move usually brings a doubling in value for the $255 billion Chinese tech giant and (BABA) rose 15% on the news. It also makes it easier for the government in Beijing to exert control. Avoid (BABA) as China is still not out of the woods yet.

S&P Case Shiller Loses Gains in January in their National Home Price Index, dropping from a 5.6% annual gain to only 3.8%. Prices have been dropping for seven straight months. San Francisco was down 8% YOY, while Seattle gave up 5%. Miami gained 14%, Tampa 11%, and Atlanta 8%.

AI Could be a $7 Trillion Business in ten years, according to Goldman Sachs. I think it could be more. AI is touted to be the next big shift in technology after the evolution of the internet, mobile, and the cloud. It will make every company you own more valuable. Buy (NVDA) on dips.

Solar Could Have a Big Year in 2023, driven by huge government subsidies and soaring electricity costs. The real net break-even cost against keeping your existing gas or oil-fired system is four years. Can’t afford it? Get the government to give you a 30% tax credit bolstered by Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. I’ve taken $250,000 in such tax credits over the last eight years. (ENPH) looks like a “BUY” here off of a 47% four-month correction. All the others have already run, like (FSLR), or are too diluted by other businesses, like (GE).

My Ten-Year View

When we come out the other side of the recession, we will be perfectly poised to launch into my new American Golden Age, or the next Roaring Twenties. The economy decarbonizing and technology hyper-accelerating, creating enormous investment opportunities. The Dow Average will rise by 800% to 240,000 or more in the coming decade. The new America will be far more efficient and profitable than the old.

Dow 240,000 here we come!

On Monday, April 3 at 7:30 AM EST, the ISM Manufacturing Index is out.

On Tuesday, April 4 at 6:00 AM, the JOLTS Job Openings Report is announced.

On Wednesday, April 5 at 7:00 AM, the ADP private Employment Report for March is printed.

On Thursday, April 6 at 8:30 AM, the Weekly Jobless Claims are announced.

On Friday, April 7 at 8:30 AM the Nonfarm Payroll Report for March is released.

As for me, few Americans know that 80% of all US air strikes during the Vietnam War originated in Thailand. At their peak in 1969, there were more US troops serving in Thailand than in South Vietnam itself.

I was one of those troops.

When I reported to my handlers at the Ubon Airbase in northern Thailand for my next mission, they had nothing for me. They were waiting for the enemy to make their next move before launching a counteroffensive. They told me to take a week off.

The entertainment options in northern Thailand in those days were somewhat limited. Phuket and the pristine beaches of southern Thailand where people vacation today were then overrun by cutthroat pirates preying on boat people and would kill you for your boots.

Life was cheap in Asia in those days, especially your life. Any trip there would be a one-way ticket.

There were the fleshpots of Bangkok and Chang Mai. But I would likely contract some dreadful disease there. I wasn’t really into drugs, figuring whatever my future was, it required a brain. Besides, some people’s idea of a good time there was throwing a hand grenade into a crowded disco. So, I, ever the history buff, decided to go look for The Bridge Over the River Kwai.

Men of my generation knew the movie well, about a company of British soldiers who were the prisoners of bestial Japanese. At the end of the movie, all the key characters die as the bridge is blown up.

I wasn’t expecting much, maybe some interesting wreckage. I knew that the truth in Hollywood was just a starting point. After that, they did whatever they had to do to make a buck.

The fall of Singapore was one of the great Allied disasters at the beginning of WWII. Japanese on bicycles chased Rolls Royce armored cars and tanks the length of the Thai Peninsula. Two British battleships, the Repulse and the Prince of Wales, were sunk due to the lack of air cover with a great loss of life. When the Japanese arrived at Singapore, the defending heavy guns were useless as they pointed out to sea.

Some 130,000 men surrendered, including those captured in Malaysia. There were also 686 American POWs, the survivors of US Navy ships sunk early in the war. Most were shipped north by train to work as slave labor on the Burma Railway.

The Japanese considered the line strategically essential for their invasion of Burma. By building a 258-mile railway connecting Bangkok and Rangoon, they could skip a sea voyage of 2,000 miles in waters increasingly dominated by American submarines.

Some 12,000 Allied troops died of malaria, beriberi, cholera, dysentery, or starvation, along with 90,000 impressed Southeast Asian workers. That earned the line the fitting name: “Death Railway.”

The Burma railway was one of the greatest engineering accomplishments in human history, ranking alongside the Pyramids of Egypt. It required the construction of 600 bridges and viaducts. It crossed countless rivers and climbed steep mountain ranges. The work was all done in 100-degree temperatures with high humidity in clouds of mosquitoes. And it was all done in 18 months.

One of those captured was my good friend James Clavell, who spent the war at Changi Prison, now the location of Singapore International Airport. Every time I land there, it gives me the creeps.

Clavell wrote up his experiences in the best-selling book and movie King Rat. He followed up with the Taipan series set in 19th century Hong Kong. We lunched daily at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan when he researched another book, Shogun, which became a top TV series for NBC.

So I navigated the Thai railway system to find remote Kanchanaburi Province where the famous bridge was said to be located.

My initial surprise was that the bridge was still standing, not destroyed as it was in the film. It was not a bridge made of wood but concrete and steel trestles. Still, you could see the scars of allied bombing on the foundations, which tried many times to destroy the bridge from the air.

That day, the Bridge Over the River Kwai was a quiet, tranquil, peaceful place. Farmers wearing traditional conical hats made of palm leaves and bamboo strips called “ngob’s” crossed to bring topical fruits and vegetables to market. A few water buffalo loped across the narrow tracks. The river Kwai gurgled below.

Once a day, a train drove north towards remote locations near the Burmese border where a bloody rebellion by the indigenous Shan people was underway.

The wars seemed so far away.

The only memorial to the war was a decrepit turn-of-the-century English steam engine badly in need of repair. There were no tourists anywhere.

So I started walking.

After I crossed the bridge, it wasn’t long before I was deep in the jungle. The ghosts of the past were ever present, and I swear I heard voices. I walked a few hundred yards off the line and the detritus of the war was everywhere: abandoned tools, rusted-out helmets, and yes, human bones. I didn’t linger because the snakes here didn’t just bite and poison you, they swallowed you whole.

After the war, the Allies used Japanese prisoners to remove the dead for burial in a nearby cemetery, only identified by their dog tags. Most of the “coolies” or Southeast Asian workers were left where they fell.

Today, only 50 miles of the original Death Railway remain in use. The rest proved impossible to maintain, because of shoddy construction, and the encroaching jungle.

There has been talk over the years of rebuilding the Burma Railway and connecting the rest of Southeast Asia to India and Europe. But with Burma, today known as Myanmar, a pariah state, any progress is unlikely.

Maybe the Chinese will undertake it someday.

Every Christmas vacation, when my family has lots of free time, I sit the kids down to watch The Bridge Over the River Kwai. I just wanted to pass on some of my experiences, teach them a little history, and remember my old friend Cavell.

Good Luck and Good Trading,

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

Walking the Bridge Over the River Kwai in 1976

The Bridge Over the River Kwai Today

1976 Death Railway Steam Engine

A Thai Farmer

March 27, 2023

Diary, Newsletter, Summary

Global Market Comments
March 27, 2023
Fiat Lux

Featured Trade:

(MARKET OUTLOOK FOR THE WEEK AHEAD, or THE BANKING CRISIS IS OVER),
(SPY), (TLT), (SCHW), (NFLX), (CS), (GLD), (USO), (BRK/B), (TSLA), (BAC), (C), (JPM), (IBKR), (MS)

CLICK HERE to download today's position sheet.

The Market Outlook for the Week Ahead, or The Banking Crisis is Over

Diary, Newsletter

I think it is safe to say that the banking crisis is now in the market. You saw this in the ritual Friday selloff of bank stocks, which last week made back two-thirds of its losses by the end of the day.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has made it clear that she will use her emergency authority to bail out the depositors of any US banks and leave the shareholders drifting in the wind. That’s OK as long as failures happen in ones and twos and not hundreds.

So after this coming dead, data-less week, we may launch into a serious rally next month, often the strongest of the year, back up to the top of the recent trading range. After that, it will be time to “Sell in May and go away,” and not come back until an interest rate collapse is imminent.

Personally, I have suites on the Queen Mary II and the Orient Express waiting for me. How about you?

And what happens when a crisis winds down? The need for protection ebbs as well. That means that big tech stocks with large balance sheets which had a great March will be due for a rest.

You see this in other flight-to-safety assets, like gold (GLD), which gave up some of its recent gains.

Given the failure of the Volatility Index ($VIX) to maintain a sustainable rally this year, it is clear that something important has changed in that market. That would be same-day options, which are stealing the thunder of the old ($VIX).

Instead of panicking and buying the ($VIX) at market, hedge fund algorithms are now programmed to buy individual same-day stock put options. That vastly increases the volatility of single stocks, with one day 10%-15% moves becoming normal.

When a piece of bad news erupts about the banking system, same-day put options across the entire sector rocket, regardless of whether any individual bank is having problems or not.

Needless to say, as ($VIX) opportunities fade, spectacular new trades are opening up in single stocks which Mad Hedge is happily taking advantage of. As a result, the profitability of our trading strategy has near doubled. This has produced the blowout numbers which I list below.

When panic put buying tanks a stock, we pile on call spreads, as we did two weeks ago with many bank and broker stocks. When fears of recession drive bond prices insanely high, we buy (TLT) put spreads.

Buy low, sell high, it’s my new investment strategy. I’m thinking of patenting it.

With some of the most extreme volatility of the year, Mad Hedge continued on up tear, with March up an eye-popping +12.52%.

My 2023 year-to-date performance is now at an incredible +38.28%. The S&P 500 (SPY) is up a miniscule +0.77% so far in 2023. My trailing one-year return maintains a sky-high +95.52% versus -10.23% for the S&P 500.

That brings my 15-year total return to +635.47%, some 2.8 times the S&P 500 (SPY) over the same period. My average annualized return has recovered to +48.26%, another new high.

I executed only two trades last week, content to leave alone my remaining eight positions that are profitable. I used a bond selloff to take profits with my bond short (TLT). A frenetic 25% rally prompted me to close out my long in Charles Schwab (SCHW) as we were nearing our maximum profit.

Fed Raises Interest Rates 25 basis points, to an overnight range of 4.75% to 5.00%, a 15-year high. But it left the door open to a further 25 basis points on May 3. The statement substantially weakened the prospect for future interest rate hikes, a de facto pause. Stocks loved the move, especially brokerage and technology stocks. Powell said the US banking system is sound and announced further support measures for small banks.

Yellen to Guarantee Deposits if More Banks Fail, which traders are taking to the bank as a nationwide government backstop. That explains the ballistic moves in financials yesterday. Today, Fed governor Jay Powell plays his hand.

Will the Banking Crisis End the Bear Market? I think so, as a drop in interest rates is the only possible solution. The Fed may have to guarantee all US bank deposits for a year to get there. Bank and technology stocks certainly think so, which have been on a tear this week.

Fed Window Increases By $94 Billion on the Week, and $400 billion in two weeks, in its so far successful effort to float the banking system. Some $60 billion went to foreign borrowers. It has to be viewed as a positive and the emergency need for funding is declining.

Netflix (NFLX) Soars 10%, by ending password sharing in Canada. The United States is expected to be next. The move is expected to boost paid subscriptions. I took profits on my long in (NFLX).

Oil (USO) Dives 1%, as the US energy secretary says it may take “years” to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. How about never?

Existing Home Sales Soar 14.5% in February, a three-year high on a signed contract basis. The annualized rate was 4.58 million according to the National Association of Home Builders. Inventories shrink to an incredible 2.6 months or 980,000 homes. The median home prices fell 0.2% to $363,000, the first decline in 11 years. The sharp drop in interest rates last week will further turbocharge sales. Cash sales were 28% of total sales.

Gold (GLD) Tops $2,000 an Ounce, as the flight to safety bid continues. Lower interest rates sooner will also provide less yield competition for precious metals. Silver will provide the higher beta from here, as it always does.

UBS Buys Credit Suisse (CS) for $3.25 Billion, less than half of where it traded on Friday, eliminating another threat to the global financial system. It looks like there were $5 billion in hidden trading losses. Some $17 billion in lower tier bonds were written down to zero, which several US bond funds like Pimco owned. The deal includes a sweetheart $100 billion loan facility from my friends at the Swiss National Bank. The forced marriage will create one of the largest banks in Europe. Some 9,000 CS jobs will get axed.

Berkshire Hathaway Steps up Share Buybacks, totaling $1.8 billion in 2022. The three-year total is an incredible $60 billion. It explains why (BRK/B) was unchanged in an otherwise horrific year. Buffet still holds a stunning $147 billion in cash, most of which is invested in US Treasury short terms bills.

My Ten-Year View

When we come out the other side of the recession, we will be perfectly poised to launch into my new American Golden Age, or the next Roaring Twenties. The economy decarbonizing and technology hyper accelerating, creating enormous investment opportunities. The Dow Average will rise by 800% to 240,000 or more in the coming decade. The new America will be far more efficient and profitable than the old.

Dow 240,000 here we come!

On Monday, March 27 at 7:30 AM EST, the Dallas Fed Manufacturing Index is out.

On Tuesday, March 28 at 6:00 AM, the S&P Case Shiller National Home Price Index is announced.

On Wednesday, March 29 at 7:00 AM, the Pending Home Sales for February are printed.

On Thursday, March 30 at 8:30 AM, the Weekly Jobless Claims are announced. The final read on Q4 GDP is disclosed.

On Friday, March 31 at 8:30 AM, the Personal Income & Spending are released.

As for me, not a lot of people get a chance to board a WWII battleship these days. So when I got the chance, I jumped at it.

As part of my grand tour of the South Pacific for Continental Airlines in 1981, I stopped at the US missile test site at Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, a mere 2,000 miles west southwest of Hawaii and just north of the equator.

Of course, TOP SECRET clearance was required and no civilians are allowed.

No problem there, as clearance from my days at the Nuclear Test Site in Nevada was still valid. Still, the FBI visited my parents in California just to be sure that I hadn’t adopted any inconvenient ideologies in the intervening years.

I met with the admiral in charge to get an update on the current strategic state of the Pacific. China was nowhere back then, so there wasn’t much to talk about in the wake of the Vietnam War.

As our meeting wound down, the admiral asked me if I had been on a German battleship. “It’s a bit before my time,” I replied. “How would you like to board the Prinz Eugen?" he responded.

The Prinz Eugen was a heavy cruiser, otherwise known as a pocket battleship built by Nazi Germany. It launched in 1938 at 16,000 tons and with eight 8-inch guns. Its sister ship was the Admiral Graf Spee, which was scuttled in the famous Battle of the River Platte in South America in 1939.

Early in the war, it helped sink the British battleship HMS Hood and damaged the HMS Prince of Wales. The Prinz Eugen spent much of the war holed up in a Norwegian fjord and later provided artillery support for the retreating German Army on the eastern front. At the end of the war, the ship was handed over to the US Navy as a war prize.

The US postwar atomic testing was just beginning so the Prinz Eugen was towed through the Panama Canal to be used as a target. Some 200 ships were assembled, including those from Germany, Japan, Britain, and even some American ships deemed no longer seaworthy like the USS Saratoga. One of the first hydrogen bombs was dropped in the middle of the fleet.

The Prinz Eugen was the only ship to remain afloat. In the Navy film of the explosion, you can see the Prinz Eugen jump 200 feet into the air and come down upright. The ship was then towed back to Kwajalein Atoll and put at anchor. A typhoon came later in 1946, capsizing and sinking it.

It was a bright at sunny day when I pulled up to the Prinz Eugen in a small boat with some Navy divers. There was no way the Navy was going to let me visit the ship alone.

The ship was upside-down, with the stern beached to the bow in 300 feet of pristine turquoise water. The propellers had recently been sent off to a war memorial in Germany. The ship’s eight cannons lay scattered on the bottom, falling out of their turrets when the ship tipped over.

The small part of the Prinz Eugen above water had already started to rust through. But once underwater it was like entering a live aquarium.
A lot of coral, seaweed, starfish, and sea urchins can accumulate in 36 years and every inch of the ship was covered. Brightly tropical fish swam in schools. A six-foot mako shark with a hungry look warily swam by.

My diver friends knew the ship well and showed me the highlights to a depth of 50 feet. The controls in the engine room were labeled in German Fraktur, the preferred prewar script. Broken dishes displayed the Nazi swastika. Anti-aircraft guns frozen in time pointed towards the bottom. No one had been allowed to remove anything from the ship since the war, and in the Navy, most men follow orders.

It was amazing what was still intact on a ship that had been blown up by a hydrogen bomb. You can’t beat “Made in Germany.” Our time on the ship was limited as the hull was still radioactive, and in any case, I was running low on oxygen.

A few years later the Navy banned all diving on the Prinz Eugen. Three divers had gotten lost in the dark, tangled in cables, and downed. I was one of the last to visit the historic ship.

I checked with my friends in the Navy and the Prinz Eugen is still there, but in deteriorating condition. When the ship started leaking oil in 2018 and staining the immaculate beaches nearby, the Navy launched a major effort to drain what was left from the 80-year-old tanks. No doubt a future typhoon will claim what is left.

So if someone asks if you know anybody who’s been on a German battleship, you can say “Yes,” you know me. And yes, my German is still pretty good these days.

Vielen dank!

Good Luck and Good Trading,

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

The Prinz Eugen in 1940

The Prinz Eugen Today

March 13, 2023

Diary, Newsletter, Summary

Global Market Comments
March 13, 2023
Fiat Lux

Featured Trade:

(THE MAD HEDGE TRADERS & INVESTORS SUMMIT IS ON MARCH 14-16)
(MARKET OUTLOOK FOR THE WEEK AHEAD, or WASHED UP ON THE BEACH)
(SPY), (TLT), (TSLA), (NVDA), (BRK/B)

CLICK HERE to download today's position sheet.

The Market Outlook for the Week Ahead, or Washed up on the Beach

Diary, Newsletter

Sometime in the next week, the following headline will cross the wires: “Body of Silicon Valley Bank Risk Manager Washes up on California Beach.” It will be noted that the face was severely bruised, and not from the pounding it took from coastal rocks or some fish.

This was no suicide but in many respects, it was. To invest the bank’s principal assets from 1982 onward into long-dated Treasury bonds from 1982 to 2020 was a great idea when prices soared, and yields plunged from 13% to 0.33%. It was positively suicidal from March of 2020 when the (TLT) dove from $180 to $92.

I always wondered which sucker was buying all those billions of dollars worth of bonds I had been selling short all those years.

Now I know.

If you had guessed why Silicon Valley Bank might go under someday, you might have thought the extension of loans to too many fragile and untested technology and biotech startups was the cause. This was not the case. It was pure bad management by the bank, which deservedly wiped out all the equity investors in a mere 48 hours.

This is not a systemic risk, nor will it lead to a financial contagion. You can thank Dodd-Frank for that which assured that America’s top banks are as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar, with leverage ratios under 10.

The FDIC is currently holding an auction of (SVB) and the outcome will be announced Sunday night. A hundred banks would love to take over (SVB)’s franchise. The $175 billion in deposits will be made who immediately, most of whom are not insured because they exceed the FDIC ceiling of $250,000 per account. The incident will be shortly forgotten about.

But when you’re in combat and a bullet passes so close to your face that you can feel the heat and the sound of an angry bee, you don’t dismiss it lightly. Maybe next time, you won’t be so lucky.

I have been inundated by calls all weekend from subscribers on what to do about Silicon Valley Bank. If the sale goes through as planned, stocks should be up 500 points on Monday morning and you should do nothing but watch in awe. If the sale fails, stocks will plunge 1,000 points and you should be loading the boat with new longs, especially banks, which will be on fire sale.

Panic, crisis, I love it. The debacle even took Berkshire Hathaway (BRK/B) down on Friday because of its copious holdings of big bank shares. It all gives me a reason to get up in the morning.

However, this does put a serious dent in stock market psychology. When the country’s 17^th largest bank goes bust, it doesn’t exactly spur you to bet the ranch on growth stocks with your retirement funds.

A test of the December market low is now firmly on the table, if not the October low. That’s especially true if Fed governor Jay Powell wants to go with the full 50 basis point rate rise on March 22.

At least the crisis finally got the Volatility Index ($VIX) out of the sub $20 doldrums, at one point pegging an intraday of $29 on Friday. We also got the Mad Hedge Market Timing Index to a six-month low of 17.

That means it is now the time to explore the wonderful world of 90-day Treasury bills, whose yields are now pushing 5.0%. That’s pretty competitive in a world where stocks yield on 2% and the potential principal risk is real.

These are issued every Wednesday with 17-week maturities and are backed by the full faith and credit of the US government. It’s as close to safety and a guaranteed return you will ever get. You buy them at a discount, and they mature at par.

If you buy a T-bill today at $98.75, it matures at $100 in three months, you get an effective annualized yield of 5.0%. You can buy these directly from the US Treasury, from your local banks, or securities houses.

Brokers never recommend T-bills because the commission is nil. They want you to keep your money in their bank which might pay 1%....or nothing at all and involve real credit risk. Just ask former MF Global customers who had to wait three years to get their money back.

Don’t expect to get a bond in the mail like you used to. All government securities have been digital since 2011. To learn more about T-bills, please click here.

I am told by the insiders who know that platinum (PPLT) could be the big precious metals play of 2023. The white metal has become the principal metal used in the manufacture of catalytic converts for conventional internal combustion cars of which 15 million a year are still made in the US.

There is rising demand from hydrogen fuel cells and the green hydrogen movement. The world’s second largest producer of platinum is Russia, whose supplies have been cut off. As a result, there is expected to be a 556,000-ounce shortage this year after two years of surpluses.

Just thought you’d like to know.

While markets crashed, investors have been jumping out of windows, and the world appeared to be ending, and the rain continuing incessantly, Mad Hedge continued on up tear with March up +3.37%.

My 2023 year-to-date performance is now at an eye-popping +29.23%. The S&P 500 (SPY) is up +1.56% so far in 2023. My trailing one-year return maintains a sky-high +85.09% versus -13.13% for the S&P 500.

That brings my 15-year total return to +626.32%, some 2.98 times the S&P 500 (SPX) over the same period. My average annualized return has recovered to +47.56%, another new high.

My short positions in (TSLA) and (NVDA) kicked in big time last week, even though some said I was “Mad” to do these. In the meantime, my longs barely budged. That leaves me 20% long, 40% short, and 40% in cash.

Nonfarm Payroll Report hot at 311,000. The Headline Unemployment Rate rose from 3.5% to 3.6%, still at a 53-year low. The broader U-6 “discouraged worker” came in at 6.8%. Leisure & Hospitality were up 175,000, and Health Care 54,000. Revisions for the past two months were -34,000. All in all, the market viewed this as a slightly positive report. That’s one big number off our backs with the inflation report due on Tuesday.

Jay Powell Lays an Egg, at least if you own stocks. Say goodbye to the soft landing and a 50 basis point hike is now looking like a sure thing. Good thing all my longs are double-hedged.

JOLTS Jolts, at 10.8 million for February, much hotter than expected. That's how many job openings remained unfilled, some 7% of the total workforce. It sets up a potentially frightening Nonfarm Payroll Report on Friday.

ADP Comes in Hot, creating 242,000 private sector jobs in February. Leisure & Hospitality led with 83,000, followed by Financials at 62,000. Brace yourself for Friday.

Some 60% of Stocks Above 200-Day Moving Average, proving that we are already six months into a new bull market. The next big dip is the one you buy. Give this selloff another week and I will start looking for more long side plays to max out my portfolio. The Armageddon crowd is going to be driving Uber cans by summer.

The Great Retirement Flight Inland is Continuing. Retirees on the coasts are selling homes and buying new ones for cash in the Midwest and south and still have enough money left over to never work again. Those in the top 10% of income earners can save $347,000 with the “retire and relocate” strategy. The problem is that locals are getting prices out of their own markets. The trend is turning red states into purple ones, as has already happened in Nevada and Arizona, which are no longer cheap.

Used Car Prices are Soaring Again, up 4.3% in January and February, the largest such gain in 2009, according to Cox Automotive. Is this setting up a scary inflation print for March 14? The stock market thinks so.

China Set’s Hot 5% Growth Target for 2023, as “zero covid” ends and herd immunity takes over. It may cost 4 million lives, but it’s worth it. Most importantly, China announced hope for a peaceful reunification with Taiwan, which takes war off the table for this decade. It’s another nail in the coffin of American underbears proclaiming a lost decade.

Oil Companies are Playing the Short Game, milking their companies for all the profits they can get at the expense of long-term capital investment, and ignoring massive tax subsidies to do so. Last year oil companies reaped a stunning $128 billion in profits, juiced by the Ukraine War which took Texas tea prices to $132 a barrel. That’s what you do when your industry may disappear in a decade. But if there is no US recession and China’s reopening accelerates, we may have to visit $100 a barrel. Buy (UNG) on dips, up 40% in two weeks.

EV Makers Running Up Against Supply Shortages. To meet ambitious production forecasts metals production has to triple quickly. I’m talking copper, aluminum, silver, chromium, and lithium. Tesla has already locked up much of the existing long-term supply because it knew ten years ago it would be someday producing 20 million cars a year. The others didn’t.

Tesla Cuts Prices Again, for the second time in a month, dropping the Model X below $100,000 for the first time. The goal is to drive EV competition out of business before they gain a foothold on Tesla’s 64% market share. What Tesla loses in profits, it can make up in volume.

Tesla Is Remaking the Car Insurance Market, charging drivers on their actual driving history, which they collect already. If you drive like a little old lady, it can run as little as $180 a month. If you drive like Mad Max, it’s more, but not as much as a conventional car insurance company. Rates change monthly depending on your driving record. Parked in a garage gives you a perfect score of 90 and it drops from there. It’s all about reducing the total cost of a Tesla car. Not such a bad deal if you let their computer do all the driving. What will Tesla disrupt next?

Was Q4 2022 the Bottom of the Real Estate Market? That’s what Compass CEO Robert Reffkin thinks. Bidding wars came back with a vengeance in January and a lot of markets were cleaned out of inventory. Mortgage interest rates losing an unusual 200 basis point premium over US Treasuries would really set this market on fire.

Biden Budget Rattles Wall Street Cage, proposing to take capital gains up from 20% to 35% and tanking the market. It’s a total unwind of the Trump tax cuts and then some, which added $2 trillion to the national debt. Most of this is a pipe dream and I would be amazed if it rose above 22%. Most interesting is the Defense spending rise to $880 billion, which is nearly the GDP of Russia, causing them to sweat bullets there. During the last 40 years, $50 trillion in wealth has moved from the bottom 80% to the top 1% according to a Rand Corporation think tank study mostly tax free, the largest and fastest such wealth transfer in human history.

Can I please get my local real estate tax deduction back, which Trump picked from my pocket in 2018?

My Ten-Year View

When we come out the other side of the recession, we will be perfectly poised to launch into my new American Golden Age, or the next Roaring Twenties. The economy decarbonizing and technology hyper accelerating, creating enormous investment opportunities. The Dow Average will rise by 800% to 240,000 or more in the coming decade. The new America will be far more efficient and profitable than the old.

Dow 240,000 here we come!

On Monday, March 13 at 7:00 AM EST, Consumer Inflation Expectations are out.

On Tuesday, March 14 March 14 at 8:30 AM EST, the Core Inflation Rate and CPI for February are announced.

On Wednesday, March 15 at 7:00 AM EST, the Producer Price Index and Retail Sales are released.

On Thursday, March 16 at 8:30 AM EST, the Weekly Jobless Claims are announced. So are February Building Permits.

On Friday, March 17 at 8:30 AM EST, the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Indicator is released.

As for me, working in Japan as a journalist during the early 1970s a lot of the principal figures of WWII were still living and I got to meet some pretty amazing people.

One of the most fascinating was Tokyo Rose, whose real name was Iva Toguri, and who I was invited to interview during a book tour of Japan for her memoirs. By then, she was in her 60s and the weight of the years had clearly shown upon her.

Tokyo Rose was notorious as the radio personality who broadcast propaganda on radio to US troops in the Pacific to demoralize them and encourage them to stop fighting.

Both my dad and uncle Mitch were regular listeners on Guadalcanal and Bougainville. I can testify that even today, entertainment choices on these remote islands are still minimal. The men said they listened because the music was good, which our own Armed Forces Radio lacked.

Toguri was a second-generation Nisei born in California to Japanese immigrant parents. She graduated from UCLA intending to become a medical doctor. When a relative in Japan became ill, she traveled there to care for her. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor shortly after she arrive and she was trapped.

Initially, she was harassed by the secret police as a potential spy as she refused to give up her American citizenship. She couldn’t even speak Japanese or use chopsticks. Locals threw rocks at her. Even her parents couldn’t help because they had been sent to an internment camp at Gila Bend, Arizona.

It was starvation that drove her to respond to an ad in the newspapers looking for a native English speaker for NHK, the Japanese national broadcast radio.

It wasn’t long before the highly educated and intelligent Toguri had her own one-hour program broadcast nightly called “Zero Hour.” Along with the latest jazz records, she announced American ships sunk, planes shot down, battles lost, and anything else to show the futility of war with Japan.

The show was so popular that NHK ramped it up to a major effort. They hired a dozen “Tokyo Roses” and broadcast on multiple high-powered frequencies from Tokyo, Manila, and Shanghai.

When US troops landed in Tokyo after the war, she was one of the first arrested. In and out of jail, she wasn’t allowed to return to the US until 1949. On arrival, she was promptly arrested by the FBI for treason. The radio commentator Walter Winchell had launched a national campaign against her with backing from the American Legion and from former US POWs in order to boost ratings.

After a lengthy trial, she became only the seventh person convicted of treason in US history and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. She was released in 1955.

She received a presidential pardon from President Gerald Ford in 1976 after it was shown that most of the evidence presented against her at trial had been fabricated by the US government. She had been the victim of inflamed postwar emotions. Tokyo rose was more a concept than a real person, and the term was never actually broadcast on Japanese radio.

I have met a lot of people like Iva Toguri over the years, in the wrong place at the wrong time, or just plain unlucky. She was used and abused by the establishments in both Japan and the US. It’s a lesson on the capriciousness of life.

Iva Toguri passed away in 2002 in Los Angeles at the age of 90.

Good Luck and Good Trading,

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

Tokyo Rose then and Later When I met Her

March 2, 2023

Diary, Newsletter, Summary

Global Market Comments
March 2, 2023
Fiat Lux

Featured Trade:

(TOUCHING BASE WITH WARREN BUFFET),
(BRK/B), (AMEX), (KO), (MS), (TSLA)

CLICK HERE to download today's position sheet.

Touching Base With Warren Buffet

Diary, Free Research, Newsletter

So how does someone with 55 years of investment experience like me learn something new? Listen to someone with 80 years of experience.

It is with great anticipation that I read Warren Buffett’s annual letter to shareholders. Having banged the table for decades that his Berkshire Hathaway (BRK/B) is a “must own” stock, keeping up with the 92-year-old Oracle of Omaha” is essential.

Besides, Warren was one of the founding subscribers to The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader 15 years ago.

I’ll give you the high points.

Berkshire companies took in a record $30.8 billion in operating profits in 2022, producing a net 3% gain in the share price.

Sounds like a deal to me!

Buffett describes himself as a business picker, not a stock picker. Over time, the great businesses prosper and compound, while the poor ones fail. The flowers bloom and the weeds wither away.

One need look no further than the Dow Average, where NO stocks were able to stay in the index over the last 100 years because of business failures. (Corn Products Refining Company? Woolworth’s? Union Carbide?). This is known as “creative destruction,” which moves capital out of the past and into the future.

“Efficient” markets exist only in textbooks, their day-to-day behavior “baffling” and only understood in retrospect.

In the ultimate act of humility, Buffet confesses to only making a dozen good decisions in his life. Coca Cola (KO) was one of those. His initial investment of $1.3 billion in 1994 is now worth $25 billion and now spins off an annual dividend of $700 million.

American Express (AXP) is the same, the initial 1995 investment of $1.3 billion is now worth $22 billion, paying $302 billion a year in dividends. Over the same time frame, an investment in 30-years bonds yielded nothing.

Warren makes the case for share buybacks, which he regularly executes whenever (BRK/B) trades at a discount. When the share count goes down, the shareholders’ ownership of the businesses goes up. This is how Berkshire created many $100 millionaires over the years.

Buffet also makes his annual case for the “Great American Tailwind.” In Buffet’s 80 years of investing, he has only seen it becalmed occasionally and briefly. Never bet against America.

Buffet started his investing career in April of 1942. Unknown to him, the US was about to win the Battle of Midway. Stocks bottomed and launched a torrid 20-year run, even though the public was unaware of the victory for three more months. It’s proof that markets see things before we mere mortals do.

As for me, I suppose I have to be even more humble than Warren Buffet, for I have only made four good investment decisions in 50 years. I agreed to accept a job offer from The Economist magazine in London, kicking off a half-century of intensive research. I took a big pay cut to go to work for Morgan Stanley (MS), which rewarded me with pre-IPO stock at book value of 25 cents a share. I bought Apple (AAPL) at $2 when Steve Jobs returned to run the company on the edge of bankruptcy. I bought Tesla (TSLA) at a split-adjusted $2.35 a share in 2010, completely buying into Elon Musk’s 30-year vision.

I only have to live another 17 years to see if he was right.

It Only Took Four Good Decisions

January 23, 2023

Diary, Newsletter, Summary

Global Market Comments
January 23, 2023
Fiat Lux

Featured Trade:

(MARKET OUTLOOK FOR THE WEEK AHEAD, or WHERE IS THE BEAR MARKET?),
(GOLD), (GLD), (WPM), (SLV), (BRK/B), (TSLA), (OXY)

CLICK HERE to download today's position sheet.

The Market Outlook for the Week Ahead, or Where is the Bear Market?

Diary, Newsletter

The Pivot has started.

Not by the Fed, which is not expected to begin lowering interest rates by the summer or fall.

It's the stock market that has pirouetted, from bear to bull last October. The higher stocks rise in this miraculous, coming-from-nowhere rally, the more credibility this rally gains.

If a new bull market has well and truly begun, then there are an awful lot of portfolios out there that have the wrong stocks. Repositioning this late in the game could take the indexes to new all-time highs by yearend.

Some portfolio managers are whistling past the graveyard right now.

The Fed pivot may also take place ahead of schedule. The marketplace has shaved the February 1 interest rate hike from 50 basis points to only 25, which explains stocks’ recent virility.

My trading performance certainly shows the possibilities, which so far has tacked on a robust +20.65%. My 2023 year-to-date performance is the same at +20.65%, a spectacular new high. The S&P 500 (SPY) is up +1.86% so far in 2023.

It is the greatest outperformance on an index since Mad Hedge Fund Trader started 15 years ago. My trailing one-year return maintains a sky high +107.27%.

That brings my 15-year total return to +617.84%, some 2.8 times the S&P 500 (SPX) over the same period and a new all-time high. My average annualized return has ratcheted up to +47.22%, easily the highest in the industry.

Last week, I rode into the Friday options expiration with my 5X weighting in bonds, as well as additional longs in (TSLA), (GOLD), (WPM), and (BRK/B). Both my remaining positions are profitable, including longs in (TSLA) and (OXY) with 80% cash for a 20% net long position.

Stocks are not the only asset class on a tear because of an earlier than expected Fed easing.

Precious metals have been going virtually straight up. For the first time since the US went off the gold standard 50 years ago, gold (GLD) outperformed the S&P 500 in Q4, and silver (SLV) did even better.

Not only does gold benefit from falling inflation and interest rates, the end of the Fed’s quantitative tightening (QT) will provide a further steroid shot as well.

Sanctions against Russia and China have sent central bank purchases of the barbarous relic to new all-time highs. And you might speculate that the possible Russian use of nuclear weapons is also driving your gold northward, but you would be wrong. You may find this shocking, but Ukraine has their own nukes and if Russia attacked, Moscow would be radioactive that week.

The bottom line here is that the yellow metal could well remain strong all year and be a top performer.

Bonds continued their on again, off again rally. The prospects of falling interest rates pushes them up and then fears of a summer default push them back down again, some $2.50 for the (TLT) last week.

One thing is certain. If the Treasury is pushed into default the Fed definitely WILL NOT be raising interest rates. They won’t need to crush the economy. The House of Representatives will be doing their job for them.

The least appreciated piece of news last week was the report that China’s population fell for the first time in 50 years, thanks to a massive famine. I remember it like it was yesterday as I was there. Believe me, there are no substitutes for food. It took me a king’s ransom and some banned western books just for me to procure a single egg.

This will affect us all as there will be a sudden shortage of customers in the global economy in about 20 years. You may think that 20 years is a long time off, but the best run companies will start planning and investing for this now.

If you don’t think a shrinking population is bad for business, just ask Japan, where they’re not making Japanese anymore. Japan has suffered the worst performing stock market for the last 32 years and is still showing a negative return.

That was a nice bail!

Remember, demographics is destiny. Check out the population pyramid charts below.

The Fed May Retreat to 25 Basis Point, in their February 1 rate hike, according to a Reuters poll. It might explain why stocks have been so hot in January.

Treasury Secretary Warns of Coming US Bond Default, saying the government runs out of money by June. Bonds plunged $2.00 on the news. The House of Representatives need to raise the debt ceiling before then, or the Treasury will cease paying interest on the $31.4 trillion national debt. This is for money already spent by administrations going back to the 1980’s. Rising interest rates have already taken America’s debt service from 5% to 10% of the total budget.

This Year Won’t Be as Bad as Last, or so hope the bulls that have been piling into stocks since January 3. The weakness in tech stocks actually understates the ballistic moves in value, metals, and financial stocks, which Mad Hedge is long. Things are better than they appear. That’s what six months of deflation will do.

China Reopening Accelerates and may well head off a global recession. Letting everyone get covid and achieving heard immunity turned out to be the key. It’s demolished the entire January selloff scenario.

Wholesale Prices Drop 0.5% in December versus an expected 0.1% in another big step toward the unwind of inflation. The energy sub index fell by 7.9%. I am looking like a 4% inflation rate by yearend.

Builder Sentiment Rose 4 Points in December according to the National Association of Homebuilders. It’s the first positive data point for housing in ages. Could this be the beginning of the big turn?

Mortgage Rates Plunge to 6.04% for the 30-year fixed, sparking a 28% gain week to week. A massive rally in the bond market is the big incentive, taking ten-year Treasury bonds to 6.37%, a new five month low. Inventory remains low. Mortgage rates could easily shed another 100 basis points by summer just on falling to the traditional premium over Treasuries, which is why housing stocks like (LEN), PHM), and (KBH) have been on fire.

Business Inventories up 0.4%, right in line with expectations. Retail Sales are falling, as is Consumer Spending. Department store sales were down 6.5%, once unimaginable to see during the Christmas season.

Netflix Blows it Away with 6.7 million new subscribers., taking the stock up 7%, and 125% from the May low. It’s proof that the FANG’s are not dead yet and that the predicted Q4 earnings shortfall may be overstated. CEO Reed Hastings semi-retires. Don’t touch (NFLX) as this train has left the station. There are better fish to fry.

My Ten-Year View

On Monday, January 23 nothing of note is announced. Baker Hughes (BKR) reports earnings from the oil patch.

On Tuesday, January 24 at 8:45 AM EST, the S&P Global PMIs for December is out. Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) and Microsoft (MSFT) report earnings.

On Wednesday, January 25 at 7:30 AM, the Crude Oil Stocks are announced. Tesla (TSLA) and Boeing (BA) report earnings.

On Thursday, January 26 at 8:30 AM, the Weekly Jobless Claims are announced. Retail Sales for November are printed. We also get US Q4 GDP. Visa (V) and Intel (INTC) report earnings.

On Friday, January 27 at 5:30 AM, the Personal Income & Spending for December is disclosed. American Express (AXP) and Chevron (CVX) report earnings. At 2:00, the Baker Hughes Oil Rig Count is out.

As for me, I didn’t know what to expect when I landed on the remote South Pacific Island of Yap in 1979, one of the Caroline Islands, but I was more than pleasantly surprised.

Barely out of the Stone Age, Yap lies some 3,000 miles west of Hawaii. It was famed for the ancient lichen covered stone money that dotted the island which had no actual intrinsic value.

The value was in the effort that went into transporting them. With some cylindrical pieces larger than cars, geologists later discovered that they had been transported some 280 miles by outrigger canoe from the point of origin sometime in the distant past. Since Yap had no written language, there are no records about them, only folktales.

I often use the stone money of Yap as an example of the arbitrariness of fiat money. Who’s to say which is more valuable; a 500-pound piece of rock or a freshly printed $100 Benjamin from the US Treasury?

You decide.

The natives were a gentle and friendly people. They wore grass skirts purely for the benefit of Western visitors. They preferred to walk around as nature made them.

There was no hotel on the island at the time, so I was invited to stay with a local chief (picture below).

One of my hosts asked if I was interested in seeing a Japanese zero fighter. Yap wasn’t invaded by the US during WWII because it was bypassed by MacArthur on his way to the Philippines. The Japanese troops were repatriated after their war, but most of their equipment was left behind. It was still there.

So it was with some anticipation that I was led to a former Japanese airfield that had been abandoned for 35 years. There, still in perfect formation, was a squadron of zeroes. The jungle had reclaimed the field and several planes had trees growing up through their wings.

The natives had long ago stripped them of anything of value, the machine guns, nameplates, and Japanese language instruments. But the airframes were still there exposed to the elements and too fragile to move.

During my stay, I came across an American Peace Corp volunteer desperate for contact with home. A Jewish woman in her thirties, she had been sent there from New York City to teach English and seemed to have been forgotten by the agency.

I volunteered for the Peace Corps. myself out of college, but it turned out they had no need of biochemists in Fiji, so I was interested in learning about her experience. She confided in me that she had tried wearing a grass skirt to blend in but got ants on the second day. We ended up spending a lot of time together and I got a first-class tour of the island.

Suffice it to say that she was thrilled to run into a red-blooded American male. I wish I had taken a picture of her, but the nearest color film processing was back in Honolulu, and I had to be judicious in my use of film.

The highlight of the trip was a tribal stick dance put on in my honor around an evening bonfire among much yelping and whooping. It was actually a war dance performed with real war clubs and their furiousness was impressive.

I had the fleeting thought that I might be on the menu. Cannibalism had been practiced here earlier in the century. During the war when starvation was rampant, several of the least popular Japanese soldiers went missing, their bodies never found. When men come screaming at you with a club in the night, your imagination runs wild.

Alas, I could only spend a week on this idyllic island. I was on a tight schedule courtesy of Air Micronesia, and deadlines beckoned. Besides, there was only one plane a week off the island.

It was on to the next adventure.

A Few New Friends

Large Denomination Stone Money

My Accommodation

A Neglected Japanese Zero

China

Japan

January 17, 2023

Diary, Newsletter, Summary

Global Market Comments
January 17, 2023
Fiat Lux

Featured Trade:

(MARKET OUTLOOK FOR THE WEEK AHEAD, or GOING AGAINST THE CONSENSUS),
(TLT), (MUB), (JNK), (HYG), (GLD), (SLV), (GOLD), (WPM), (FCX), (BHP), (EEM), (MS), (GS), (JPM), (BAC), (C), (BRK/B), (SPY), (QQQ), (IWM), (VIX)