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August 12 Biweekly Strategy Webinar Q&A

Below please find subscribers’ Q&A for the August 12 Mad Hedge Fund Trader Global Strategy Webinar broadcast from Lake Tahoe, NV with my guest and co-host Bill Davis of the Mad Day Trader. Keep those questions coming!

Q: I just joined your service. Can you explain the logic to your current model trading portfolio?

I always try to balance long positions with short position. That greatly mitigates the risk of an out-of-the-blue crash, like we saw in February. Also, every individual position has a long and short, further reducing volatility. And you never can lose more money than you put up, so your risk is defined. That’s another classic risk control measure.

There is a further four hedge in that the portfolio is spread across all asset classes. So, I am long banks (JPM), (BAC), short US Treasury bonds (TLT), short a basket of big tech stocks (AAPL), (AMZN), (FB) and long gold (GLD). Something is always working where you can take profits. Our proprietary Mad Hedge Market Timing Index is always a big help in judging the best time to enter and exit these asset classes.

That is the short course on hedge fund risk management 101.

Q: Is it a good time to add in gold (GLD) here?

A: Yes, my long-term target for gold is $3,000/oz, possibly higher—it’s very common once you get a breakout from a 7-year bottoming process to get a big move like that. You always go back and retest that breakout level, that’s what’s happening now. I would use this dip to buy gold. You can look at (GLD) itself, the (GDX) gold miners which will give you 4:1 leverage over gold, or any of the 2x or 3x gold leveraged ETFs like (NUGT). There are lots of ways to play gold this time left from over the last bull market in gold ten years ago. So yes, bullish on gold with a temporary pullback in store. This recovery trade, which is buying banks, casinos, hotels, restaurants, weak dollar, weak buy market, weak gold—this is all temporary, this is just a trade. Those will all reverse themselves, probably by September if not sooner. So, if you missed the first round in the gold bull market, there’s certainly another chance to get back in.

Q: Do you think Biden and Harris will crash the stock market if elected?

A: No, since Biden started to run away in the polls, the stock market basically went straight up every day, and I prefer the stock market’s judgment on these things to opinion polls or talking heads. As far as Harris is concerned, she was the most middle of the road conservative pick of the 12 or so people they were looking at for vice president. Certainly, she’s a favorite with Wall Street, and isn’t it interesting they’re looking for the talents of a prosecutor in the White House? Who do you think they have in mind? So yes, that’s a net positive for the market. If anything, a new administration will bring a whole new round of Quantitative Easing and deficit spending, except it will be focused on bailing out Main Street, not Wall Street.

Q: Is the vaccine drug maker Moderna (MRNA) overbought here at 70?

A: Yes, I think to get any more appreciation you need to get an actual result on the many vaccines that are out there.

Q: Will Tesla (TSLA) pass 2,000 by year end?

A: I tend not to think so; Tesla had a once-in-a-lifetime 10-fold increase over a year. That is a very big move to digest, and while I’m saying people should keep their Tesla longs for the long term, short term you want to be selling calls against your long positions to hedge any downside and to take in some extra income.

Q: What caused ten-year US Treasury yields (TLT) to jump 14% yesterday? What will yields do from here?

A: Yields will go up and retest the 95-basis point level we saw a couple of months ago. That means we’re going to have a clear shot at adding shorts, probably for the next several weeks or months.

Q: I got the first TLT trade, but when I added the second one, I had to automatically close out my 175 short position to add the long 175 put position.

A: That is the correct way to do this. And what you end up with is a wider spread with a much larger size. So, you take all three positions we currently have, and you now have a (TLT) August $170-177.5 bear put spread in triple the original size and triple the profit, which expires in 5 trading days. It’s a trade with a very high return over a very short time frame. It’s the kind of trade that’s only available with very high volatilities in the market—at $25 in the (VIX), and you get very high accelerated time decay going into the close. So, it really was a two-week expiration play on the (TLT).

Q: Apple (AAPL) has been able to avoid any major damage in its share price in this trade war. How long can it last?

A: It can last 3 more months, until the election. It’s really quite amazing that the Chinese have not retaliated against Apple in all of these trade wars, and the reason for this is that Apple employs a million people in China, and they make a ton of money out of it. Apple has also managed their relationship with the communist government perfectly. So, that’s why they haven’t been hit. General Motors, other US companies—they could get expropriated. If the US can expropriate TikTok, what’s to stop China from expropriating General Motors, Starbucks, or even Apple for that matter?

Q: How do we know who has a real vaccine and who has a fake one? There’s so much information out there, I have a hard time filtering through what is real.

A: Wait for 100,000 people to try it out first—that’s what my plan is. That will be the safe way to do it. And if that means quarantining another couple of months to make sure you get the real deal, it’s worth the investment. Most industry safety standards, like animal trials, have been ditched by the FDA in order to get Trump a vaccine before the election. Putin is doing the same in Russia.

Q: Why is Warren Buffet buying back shares of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK/B) in record amounts? Is it because he sees no good investments?

A: He’d rather buy his own shares at parity or at a small premium than pay record PE multiples for essentially anything else in the market. Because the government rushed in so quickly to support the stock market, there never were any real deals in stocks, they never really got cheap. Yes, it sounds like down 40% in 2 months is cheap, but stocks weren’t, not even close to cheap, on a PE multiple basis. We never got close to the 9 ½X we saw in 2009. Also, if you believe in a recovery play, the ultimate recovery play is Berkshire Hathaway because they own predominantly old-line industrial cash flow stocks, which will lead any real recovery in the economy. So, at this point, Berkshire Hathaway will probably get you a higher return on a 12-month view than say Apple, Facebook or Amazon.

Q: Gold (GLD) vs Silver (SLV)? Which is better? And what about Copper (FCX)?

A: Silver always outperforms gold by at least 2 to 1 in any real economic recovery. Copper prices have risen 30% in 4 months; that is discounting a real economic recovery someday, so I would be buying copper on dips also.

Q: How do we learn more about options?

A: I suggest you go to the “How to Trade” section on our website, and that has links. Every trade alert we send out also has a link to a video that tells you exactly how to do the options part of that trade. And if you don’t want to do options, we also propose ETF and single stocks.

Q: What year end effect on the market do you see from a Biden tax plan on long term capital gains and qualified dividends at the ordinary income rate?

A: Well, if he actually proposes that, there will be a rush to sell assets by the end of the current year so people can take advantage of the very favorable capital gains tax that exist now. However, it’s not known whether that is actually the tax increase he’s proposing; it’s more likely he’ll simply return to the pre-Trump tax rates. However, I do expect him to come up with highly punitive tax rates on any real estate-related investment as a way of getting back at Trump. And that’s like loss carry forwards, steps up in the cost basis, 1031 exchanges—things specific to the real estate industry.

Q: If you think markets are going to come off, why aren’t you more aggressive buying the iPath Series B S&P 500 VIX Short Term Futures ETN (VXX)?

A: (VXX) has become such a professional market it really has become a day trading vehicle. It’s hard to get customers in and out of this thing fast enough to make them money, as most of my followers are not set up to be day traders. It’s a market where 90% of the professionals are playing from the short side, so when you get moves up, they essentially happen over 1 or 2 days, and then they spend weeks or months bleeding off. It really is a tough trade for a retail trader to do; and it is an area where the insiders in Chicago trade this thing and really do have an in-house advantage that I would rather not try to bet against.

Q: I sold the top on all precious metals positions and started buying back today. Was that the right thing to do?

A: Yes, I have a feeling it is. Start scaling in—if you’re nervous about buying gold here, buy a third of a position now, a third if it’s higher or lower, and a third if it’s higher or lower again. That’s what any pro would do.

Q: Do you see another big economic crisis in 2021?

A: I don’t think so; I think any continued weakness will be hit with massive liquidity from the Fed and more government spending. Now that they found the model to keep the economy going, they’re going to just keep at it, no matter who is in power. Roosevelt kept at it for 5 years to end the Great Depression, until he was bailed out by WWII, so hopefully we don’t have to bail our economy out the same way with WWIII.

Q: What about Bitcoin here?

A: We don’t trade Bitcoin as we think the whole thing is a giant scam. There’s also no value added by anyone. Insiders have a huge advantage, the people who are creating the bitcoin to sell. So, it’s a security with no fundamentals—thus unanalyzable.

Good Luck and Stay Healthy

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

July 22, 2020

Diary, Newsletter, Summary

Global Market Comments
July 22, 2020
Fiat Lux

Featured Trade:

(MY NEWLY UPDATED LONG-TERM PORTFOLIO),
(PFE), (BMY), (AMGN), (CELG), (CRSP), (FB), (PYPL), (GOOGL), (AAPL), (AMZN), (SQ), (JPM), (BAC), (BABA), (EEM), (FXA), (FCX), (GLD)

My Newly Updated Long-Term Portfolio

Diary, Newsletter, Research

I am really happy with the performance of the Mad Hedge Long Term Portfolio since the last update on October 17, 2019. In fact, not only did we nail the best sectors to go heavily overweight, we completely dodged the bullets in the worst-performing ones, especially in energy.

For new subscribers, the Mad Hedge Long Term Portfolio is a “buy and forget” portfolio of stocks and ETFs. If trading is not your thing, these are the investments you can make, and then not touch until you start drawing down your retirement funds at age 70 ½.

For some of you, that is not for another 50 years. For others, it was yesterday.

There is only one thing you need to do now and that is to rebalance. Buy or sell what you need to reweight every position to its appropriate 5% or 10% weighting. Rebalancing is one of the only free lunches out there and always adds performance over time. You should follow the rules assiduously.

Despite the seismic changes that have taken place in the global economy over the past nine months, I only need to make minor changes to the portfolio, which I have highlighted in red.

To download the entire portfolio in an excel spreadsheet, please go to www.madhedgefundtrader.com , log in, go to “My Account”, then “Global Trading Dispatch”, then click on the “Long Term Portfolio” button.

My 5% holding in Biogen (BIIB) was taken over by Bristol Myers (BMY) at a hefty premium at an all-time high, so I’ll take the win. I am replacing it with Covid-19 vaccine frontrunner Bristol Myers (BMY) itself.

I am also taking out healthcare provider Cigna (CI), whose profits have been hammered by the pandemic. A future Biden administration might also move to a national healthcare system that will cap profits. I am replacing it with another Covid-19 vaccine leader Pfizer (PFE).

My 30% weighting in technology remains the same. Even though these stocks are 30% more expensive than they were three years ago, I believe they will lead the charge into the 2020s. It’s where the big growth is. These have doubled or more over the past nine months.

I am sticking with a 10% weighting in banking. Thanks to trillions in stimulus loans, they are now the most government-subsidized sector of the economy. I also believe that massive bond issuance by the US Treasury will deliver a sharply steepening yield curve, another pro bank development.

With my 10% international exposure, I am taking out a 5% weight in slow-growth Japan and replacing it with Chinese Internet giant Alibaba (BABA). The US will most likely dial back its vociferous anti-Chinese stance next year and (BABA) will soar.

I am executing another switch in my foreign currency exposure, taking out a long in the Japanese yen (FXY) and a short in the Euro (EUO) and substituting in a double long in the Australian dollar (FXA).

Australia will be a leveraged beneficiary of a recovery in the global economy, both through a recovery on commodity prices and gold which has already started, and the post-pandemic return of Chinese tourism and investment. I argue that the Aussie will eventually make it to parity with the US dollar, or 1:1.

I’m quite happy with my 10% holding in gold (GLD), which should move to new all-time highs imminently….and then go ballistic.

As for energy, I will keep my weighting at zero, no matter how cheap it has gotten. Never confuse “gone down a lot” with “cheap”. I think the bankruptcies have only just started and will stretch on for a decade. Thanks to hyper-accelerating technology, the adoption of electric cars, and less movement overall in the new economy, energy is about to become free.

My ten-year assumption for the US and the global economy remains the same.

When we come out the other side of this, we will be perfectly poised to launch into my new American Golden Age, or the next Roaring Twenties. With interest rates still at zero, oil cheap, there will be no reason not to. The Dow Average will rise by 400% or more in the coming decade. The American coming out the other side of the pandemic will be far more efficient and profitable than the old.

I hope you find this useful and I’ll be sending out another update in six months so you can rebalance once again.

Stay healthy.

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

December 17, 2019

Diary, Newsletter, Summary

Global Market Comments
December 17, 2019
Fiat Lux

Featured Trade:

(WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 5 MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA STRATEGY LUNCHEON)
(THE NEXT COMMODITY SUPER CYCLE HAS ALREADY STARTED)
(COPX), (GLD), (FCX), (BHP), (RIO), (SIL),
(PPLT), (PALL), (GOLD), (ECH), (EWZ), (IDX)

December 11, 2019

Diary, Newsletter, Summary

Global Market Comments
December 11, 2019
Fiat Lux

Featured Trade:

(WHAT TO BUY AT MARKET TOPS?),
(CAT), ($COPPER), (FCX), (BHP), (RIO),
(EUROPEAN STYLE HOMELAND SECURITY),
(TESTIMONIAL)

December 4 Biweekly Strategy Webinar Q&A

Diary, Newsletter

Below please find subscribers’ Q&A for the Mad Hedge Fund Trader December 4 Global Strategy Webinar broadcast from Silicon Valley, CA with my guest and co-host Bill Davis of the Mad Day Trader. Keep those questions coming!

Q: How do you see the markets playing out in 2020?

A: Well, I’m looking at small single-digit positive returns with a lot of volatility. Much of this year’s performance—30% in the S&P 500 (SPY), up 56% for the Mad Hedge Fund Trader—has already been pulled forward from 2020, thanks to super low interest rates and massive deficit spending. So, the more money we make now, the less money we make next year.

Q: How deep will the next recession be?

A: I’m looking for two quarters of small negative numbers like -0.1% or -0.2%, and then it’s off to the races again. That’s when the Golden Age of the Next Roaring Twenties starts, which I have already written a book about (click here).
And it’s possible we may not even see any negative numbers on a quarterly basis; we may just get close to zero, threatening it without actually breaking it. Of course, you could still get a 20% correction in the overall stock market if they only THINK we are going into recession, which has happened many times in the last 10 years.

Q: Are you expecting a market crash?

A: No; I do expect a meaningful pullback but frankly, right now, I do not see the conditions in place for that. None of the traditional causes of recessions, high-interest rates or high oil prices, are evident yet. The biggest threat to the market right now is the 2020 presidential election. And we are at a 14-year high in stock valuations.

Q: How bad will it get for car makers, and will the Tesla (TSLA) plant in Germany affect sales for European cars?

A: European carmakers have already been badly affected by Tesla, with Tesla taking over practically the entire luxury end of the market—that’s why companies like Mercedes, Audi and BMW are doing so badly with their shares, and they’re so far behind it’s unlikely they’ll ever catch up. The Berlin factory, I believe, is a battery factory, and after that, there will be a vehicle production factory, probably somewhere in eastern Europe where the cost basis is much lower.

Q: Double Line Capital’s CEO Jeff Gundlach says the US will get crushed in the next recession? Do you agree with him?

A: Well, my first advice to you is never take stock advice from a bond trader. Jeff Gundlach makes these spectacular forecasts, but the timing can be terrible. He can be wrong for 9 months before they finally turn. So, you can go out of business trading off of Jeff Gundlach’s stock advice, though his bond advice is valuable.

Q: Do you have any good recommendations for dividend stocks?

A: Yes, look at the entire cellphone towers REIT sector. That will be a growth sector next year with 5G rolling out and they have very high dividend yields. We’re going to get a significant increase in the number of cell towers thanks to 5G, and there are REITs specifically dedicated to cellphone towers. An example is Crown Castle (CCI), which has a generous 3.45% dividend yield.

Q: Are we in the final stages of a blow-off top for the stock market?

A: Yes, but blow-off tops can continue for many months, so don’t rush to sell short. However, next time the VIX gets down to 11, start buying six-month call options on the Volatility Index (VIX) at the $20 strike price. Go far out in the calendar to minimize time decay and far out of the money on strike prices to maximize your bang per buck.

Q: Gold had a nice day on Monday—is this the start of a reversal from the selling pressure?

A: No, as long as the market is pushing to new highs, which it seems to be doing—you don’t want to be anywhere near gold; wait for a better opening lower down.

Q: Are you sending Trade Alerts out on the Mad Hedge Biotech & Healthcare letter?

A: Not in the form that we see in Global Trading Dispatch or the Mad Hedge Technology Letter. Essentially, everything we’ve put out so far has been a long term buy. Most people know nothing about these sectors and we’re trying to get them into buyable names. So far, we’ve issued “BUYS” for 20 different companies; all of them have gone straight up. So, it’s really more of a long term buy-in hold situation. Since we’re in the very early days of the boom in biotech and healthcare stocks, you don’t want to leave money on the table with short term trade alerts for call spreads when there is a double or triple in the stock at hand. We are doing call spreads in the main market where most stocks are already at all-time highs in order to limit our risk.

Q: Fidelity just said that 50% of baby boomers who manage their own portfolio should rebalance it. What do you think is the best way to optimize my portfolio, as a baby boomer born in 1954?

A: You should always rebalance every year, especially when you get enormous moves in single sectors. The interesting thing this year is that everything went up, so you may not need to rebalance that much. When I say rebalance, I’m referring to rebalancing your weightings of stocks vs bonds. If you’re over 50, you want to have roughly a 50/50 ratio on those. That would suggest pairing back some of your equity weightings, increasing your bond weighting because stocks (SPY) (30% total return) have risen a lot more than bonds (TLT) (19% total return) this year.

Q: Marijuana stock Tilray (TLRY) has just had a pitiful year going from $100 to $20 and missed earnings targets for 4 for straight quarters. Could this go to zero?

A: Yes; after all, how hard is it to grow a weed? I never bought the story on the whole marijuana sector, not only because they are not allowed to participate in the financial sector. It’s an all-cash business; you hear about people moving around suitcases full of $100 bills doing deals in Oakland and Denver. I believe anybody can do this. My real estate agent is quitting his business to go into cannabis farming. Additionally, they’re getting a lot of competition from the black market where everybody used to buy their marijuana because it’s tax-free. There’s about a 40% price difference between the tax-paying legal form of marijuana and the tax-free black market where people used to get their marijuana. There’s no great value added there. It’s not like they’re designing a 96 stack microprocessor.

Q: What do you think about Ali Baba (BABA), the Chinese internet giant?

A: I love it long term. Short term, it will be subject to trade war gyration; so use the big dips to buy into it because long term we come out of this.

December 2, 2019

Diary, Newsletter, Summary

Global Market Comments
December 2, 2019
Fiat Lux

Featured Trade:
(MARKET OUTLOOK FOR THE WEEK AHEAD, or 2020 IS ALREADY HAPPENING),
(TSLA), (X), (GE), (FCX), (SLB), (GOOGL), (MSFT), (GLD)

The Market Outlook for the Week Ahead, or 2020 is Already Happening

Diary, Newsletter

You know the melt-up that is going on in the stock market right now? That is your 2020 performance being pulled forward.

One thing I have noticed over the past half-century of trading is that when market participants agree on a direction, it gets accelerated. Once the traditional October selloff failed to show, it was pedal to the metal to achieve new all-time highs.

Traders have become so overconfident that they have already completed this year’s performance and are now working on next year's. They are in effect pulling performance forward from 2020.

This historic run is taking place in the face of year-on-year earnings growth that is zero. ALL of the 29% price appreciation in the S&P 500 (SPY) in 2019 has been due to multiple expansion, from 14 times earnings to 19 times, a 20-year high. Market multiples rising by 50% anytime is almost unprecedented in history. I can only recall that happening twice: in 1929 and 1999.

So, that leaves only two possibilities for 2020. Either the multiple rises to a new 20-year multiple high, say to 20, 21, or 22, or the stock market goes down.

With a trade war-induced global economic slowdown still unfolding, don’t expect any respite from a sudden earnings recovery. Enjoy 2019 because the more we go up now means the more we will go down in 2020.

Were you waiting for the euphoria to make a market top? This is it. Sharply rising markets in the face of sharply falling earnings can only end in tears.

Needless to say, risk in the stock market is very high right now.

Jay Powell gave the market another boost, promising to hit the Fed’s 2% inflation target, giving plenty of room for wage hikes. The last inflation reading was 1.7% YOY. He might as well have said Dow 29,000 by yearend. I wish it were always this easy.

Hong Kong stalled the rally with the passage of a pro-democracy support by congress, with sanctions. China is warning of “firm countermeasures.” That throws cold water on any trade deal for 2019. New all-time highs for stocks may have to take a vacation.

US Q3 GDP was revised up to 2.1%, an improvement of 0.2% from the last read. The trade war seems to be costing us 1% of growth a year or about one-third of the total. That’s why we’re getting such a strong stock market move on the possibility of a trade deal. No-deal means lookout below.

Durable Goods came in at 0.6% in October, a nine-month high and better than expected. What does this week’s spate of positive data means, the first in many months? Is the recession risk over? If so, how much is already in the price?

Stocks love a steepening yield curve, with long term interest rates rising faster than short term ones. It puts the recession talk on hold, if not in abeyance.

It’s time to go dumpster diving, as the upside breakout in the Russell 2000 demonstrated last week. So, it’s time to start looking at the forlorn and the ignored of this bull market, like US Steel (X), General Electric (GE), Freeport McMoRan (FCX), and Schlumberger (SLB). There are no fundamentals in any of these names, they’ve just been down for so long anything looks like up from here. The liquidity-driven bull market has to find some fresh meat to rotate into, even temporarily, or it will die.

S&P Case Shiller rose 3.2% in September, the third consecutive month of price increases. Only San Francisco is showing falling prices. Phoenix (6.0%), Charlotte (4.6%), and Tampa (4.5%) are showing the greatest prices rises. Only a shortage of inventory is preventing prices from rising faster, now at a record low of 3.9 months. The builders who went under ten years ago aren’t building anymore.

New Home Sales drop 0.7%, in October, but are still up a massive 31.6% YOY. Sales in the northeast and south plunged, while those in the Midwest and west rise. The seasonally adjusted annual rate is 733,000 units. The Median Home Price fell 3.6% to $316,700. A 30-year fixed-rate mortgage at 3.66% is a major factor.

Merger mania in drug land continues, with the Novartis takeover of The Medicines Co. for $9.7 billion. It wants to take on Amgen (AMGN), Regeneron (REGN), and Sanofi in the heart drug space. No wonder this is the top-performing sector since I launched the Mad Hedge Biotech and Healthcare Letter.

Tesla shattered, both windows and sales records with an incredible 250,000 cyber trucks sold in a week. It’s one of the largest consumer orders in history, second only to the Tesla Model 3 launch four years ago. I may get one myself to make the Lake Tahoe run on a single 500-mile charge. Keep buying (TSLA) on dips. It is the clearest ten bagger out there.

Who is the mystery gold (GLD) buyer? Someone made a massive bet in the options market that gold will rise above $4,000 an ounce in 18 months. It would take a 32% move just to get gold back to its old $1,927 high. If the trade war continues, we may get it.

This was a week for the Mad Hedge Trader Alert Service to burst upon new all-time highs. I know this sounds boring, but I made all the money long technology stocks. This is net a -2.16% loss on my short position in Tesla (TSLA). If I’d only held on two more days this would have been a big winner over the disappointment over the shocking Cyber truck design. My long positions have shrunk to my core (MSFT) and (GOOGL).

By the way, running out of positions at a market top is a good thing.

My Global Trading Dispatch performance held steady at +352.76% for the past ten years, pennies short of an all-time high. My 2019 year-to-date catapulted back up to +52.62%. We closed out November with a respectable +3.07% profit. My ten-year average annualized profit ground back up to +35.28%.

The coming week will be hot with the jobs data trifecta.

On Monday, December 2 at 8:00 AM, the ISM Manufacturing PMI for November is out.

On Tuesday, December 3 at 2:30 PM, the API Crude Oil Stocks are announced.

On Wednesday, December 4, at 6:15 AM, the private sector ADP Employment Report is published.

On Thursday, December 5 at 8:30 AM, the Weekly Jobless Claims are printed.

On Friday, December 6 at 8:30 AM, the November Nonfarm Payroll Report is released.

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

As for me, I am going to battle my way through the blizzards at Donner Pass this weekend to get back to the San Francisco Bay Area. There, I’ll be helping the local Boy Scout troop to set up their Christmas tree lot. The enterprise helps finance all the camping trips for the coming year.

Good luck and good trading.

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

November 15, 2019

Diary, Newsletter, Summary

Global Market Comments
November 15, 2019
Fiat Lux

Featured Trade:

(NOVEMBER 13 BIWEEKLY STRATEGY WEBINAR Q&A),
(FCX), (TSLA), (FXI), (SPY), (AAPL), (M), (BA), (TLT)

November 13 Biweekly Strategy Webinar Q&A

Diary, Newsletter

Below please find subscribers’ Q&A for the Mad Hedge Fund Trader November 13 Global Strategy Webinar broadcast from Silicon Valley, CA with my guest and co-host Bill Davis of the Mad Day Trader. Keep those questions coming!

Q: Has the multiyear decline in commodities ended, such as for Freeport McMoRan (FCX)?

A: Yes, for the short term. However, we will almost certainly have another recession scare—or even election scare—sometime next year. That will cause a retest of the recent lows in commodities. The volatility will continue, but the long-term trend is up. The next recession will likely be so short that people will start discounting the recovery now. If you’re only looking for a 2-quarter recession and have a long-term view of your stocks, you probably want to use any kind of dips to buy now. A lot of the recent buying in Tesla (TESLA), by the way, has been of that nature.

Q: Will the US eventually drop all tariffs on Chinese imports (FXI), or do you see the US raising them?

A: I think eventually they will solve the trade war next year, right in front of the election—maybe June/July/August—so that Trump has something to run on. It’s too early to solve it now for political purposes. The whole trade war was essentially designed to depress the economy and then bring in Trump as the savior right before the election, and that has all tariffs disappearing sometime next year. By the way, some of the buying in the market now is discounting the end to the uncertainty of the trade war. So, either that or it ends when Trump leaves office—in either case, that’s 15 months off. Many big institutions think in timeframes much longer than that.

Q: Can the US consumer bring us through the holiday season to have equities (SPY) finish at all-time highs?

A: Yes, they can; I thought we might get a dip to trade off of in Oct/Nov, but we haven't gotten it. It’s looking more and more like a melt-up into year-end, even though it’s a slow-motion melt-up of 50 or 100 points a day.

Q: Will Apple (AAPL) keep going up every day forever?

A: No, don’t forget that Apple can have 40% pullbacks at any time without warning. Usually, they happen with new product launches. I would think we’re getting overextended here. If we somehow get a 10% or 20% pullback in Apple next year, I’d be jumping back into that for the product launch next September when we’ll likely hit $200, which has been my target for Apple for a very long time.

Q: Is it time to make a short term buy of beaten-down retail names like Macy’s (M)?

A: No, I am a person who trades with the long-term trend at all times. Most people are not agile or smart enough to do counter-trend trades and make money, and the risk/reward is also terrible—you make a mistake, you get killed on those. I think this company’s having a going-out-of-business sale, unless we enter a major increase in economic growth in this country, which is nowhere in the cards. If anything, I’m looking for a sharp rally to sell into. Macy’s might want to test that 200-day moving average up there at $20 at some point; that would be a great selling place. But no, we don’t want to touch the retailers right here, and retailers have been very kind to us this year on the short side.

Q: Do you see the United States US Treasury Bond Fund (TLT) as a safe-haven buy at today’s prices, or are bonds overpriced?

A: I think we’re getting the safe-haven bid as a hedge against stocks selling off. Wildly overbought Mad Hedge Market Timing Indexes are also great places to buy bonds because when you finally get the correction in the stock market, money piles into bonds, and you want to be buying the (TLT) before it does that.

Q: Is Boeing (BA) a short for the next 6 months?

A: No, I think the short play on Boeing is over. If we do get another run down to $325, take it as a gift and load the boat. I think the next major move in Boeing is to $400. Buy the dips.

Q: Do you think the Fed will cut one more time before the year is over, or will they hold off?

A: They will hold off—Powell said as much in this morning’s speech. He really said that not only will there be no more cuts this year, but next year as well, because we are essentially eating our seed corn when it comes to the next recession if we do cut rate because that means there will be no tools with which to get out of the recession.

Q: Are you seeing stocks rising to the end of the year, into the first of next year? If so, will there be a pullback during November before a final rise?

A: Yes we are seeing stocks rise to the end of the year; and you would think we will see some kind of pullback, but we have so much liquidity chasing so few stocks now, any pullbacks may be limited.

Q: (TLT) is called the iShares Barclay 20+ year bond fund. In your trade alerts, you talk about 10-year yields. How are the 10-year yields linked to the (TLT)?

A: There isn't a liquid 10-year bond ETF. There are ETFs but they’re fairly illiquid, so I put everyone into the 20-year (TLT) purely for liquidity reasons.

Q: What about going outright long on the (TLT)?

A: That’s not a bad option; the only problem with outright longs is you make no money if we grind sideways for a while, whereas with the options trade, you get in all the time decay. And we only did the December's, which have about 27 days left in them in trading time.

Q: Tesla just announced it will open a Berlin factory—what does this mean for Tesla and the share providers?

A: Well, it creates the means by which Tesla can increase its production from 400,000 cars this year to 5,000,000 cars a year in 10 years. And it’s just one other factory; expect more to come. Interestingly, their first choice was actually Great Britain, but Brexit scared them out of there.

Q: Do you think Silicon Valley should be a judge on political advertising?

A: I think Silicon Valley should not allow publication of obviously false content which they do now. That’s something the mainstream media are not allowed to do or they will get fined by the Federal Communications Commission. That ban does not apply to social media companies like Facebook (FB) and Twitter (TWTR) but should be as they are vastly more powerful than conventional media. Without it, you'll continue to see massive amounts of false information put out on the Internet. I can see the fake info clearly, but most can’t. I saw a statistic yesterday saying that roughly 50% of all information you read on the internet is false.

Good Luck and Good Trading
John Thomas
CEO & Publisher
The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader

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