Global Market Comments
October 1, 2018
Fiat Lux
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I have a request for all of you readers. Please do not nominate me for justice of the Supreme Court.
I have no doubt that I could handle the legal load. A $17 copy of Litigation for Dummies from Amazon would take care of that.
I just don’t think I could get through the approval process. There isn’t a room on Capitol Hill big enough to house all the people who have issues with my high school background.
In 1968, I ran away from home, hitchhiked across the Sahara Desert, was captured by the Russian Army when they invaded Czechoslovakia, and had my front teeth knocked out by a flying cobblestone during a riot in Paris. I pray what went on in Sweden never sees the light of day.
So, I’m afraid you’ll have to look elsewhere to fill a seat in the highest court in the land. Good luck with that.
The most conspicuous market action of the week took place when several broker upgrades of major technology stocks. Amazon (AMZN) was targeted for $2,525, NVIDIA (NVDA) was valued at $400, and JP Morgan, always late to the game (it’s the second mouse that gets the cheese), predicted Apple (AAPL) would hit a lofty $270.
That would make Steve Jobs’ creation worth an eye-popping $1.3 trillion.
The Mad Hedge Market Timing Index dove down to a two-month low at 46. That was enough to prompt me to jump back into the market with a few cautious longs in Amazon and Microsoft (MSFT). The fourth quarter is now upon us and the chase for performance is on. Big, safe tech stocks could well rally well into 2019.
Facebook (FB) announced a major security breach affecting 50 million accounts and the shares tanked by $5. That prompted some to recommend a name change to “Faceplant.”
The economic data is definitely moving from universally strong to mixed, with auto and home sales falling off a cliff. Those are big chunks of the economy that are missing in action. If you’re looking for another reason to lose sleep, oil prices hit a four-year high, topping $80 in Europe.
The trade wars are taking specific bites out of sections of the economy, helping some and damaging others. Expect to pay a lot more for Christmas, and farmers are going to end up with a handful of rotten soybeans in their stockings.
Barrick Gold (ABX) took over Randgold (GOLD) to create the world’s largest gold company. Such activity usually marks long-term bottoms, which has me looking at call spreads in the barbarous relic once again.
With inflation just over the horizon and commodities in general coming out of a six-year bear market, that may not be such a bad idea. Copper (FCX) saw its biggest up day in two years.
The midterms are mercifully only 29 trading days away, and their removal opens the way for a major rally in stocks. It makes no difference who wins. The mere elimination of the uncertainty is worth at least 10% in stock appreciation over the next year.
At this point, the most likely outcome is a gridlocked Congress, with the Republicans holding only two of California’s 52 House seats. And stock markets absolutely LOVE a gridlocked Congress.
Also helping is that company share buybacks are booming, hitting $189 billion in Q2, up 60% YOY, the most in history. At this rate the stock market will completely disappear in 20 years.
On Wednesday, we got our long-expected 25 basis-point interest rate rise from the Federal Reserve. Three more Fed rate hikes are promised in 2019, after a coming December hike, which will take overnight rates up to 3.00% to 3.25%. Wealth is about to transfer from borrowers to savers in a major way.
The performance of the Mad Hedge Fund Trader Alert Service eked out a 0.81% return in the final days of September. My 2018 year-to-date performance has retreated to 27.82%, and my trailing one-year return stands at 35.84%.
My nine-year return appreciated to 304.29%. The average annualized return stands at 34.40%. I hope you all feel like you’re getting your money’s worth.
This coming week will bring the jobspalooza on the data front.
On Monday, October 1, at 9:45 AM, we learn the August PMI Manufacturing Survey.
On Tuesday, October 2, nothing of note takes place.
On Wednesday October 3 at 8:15 AM, the first of the big three jobs numbers is out with the ADP Employment Report of private sector hiring. At 10:00 AM, the August PMI Services is published.
Thursday, October 4 leads with the Weekly Jobless Claims at 8:30 AM EST, which rose 13,000 last week to 214,000. At 10:00 AM, September Factory Orders is released.
On Friday, October 5, at 8:30 AM, we learn the September Nonfarm Payroll Report. The Baker Hughes Rig Count is announced at 1:00 PM EST.
As for me, it’s fire season now, and that can only mean one thing: 1,000 goats have appeared in my front yard.
The country hires them every year to eat the wild grass on the hillside leading up to my house. Five days later there is no grass left, but a mountain of goat poop and a much lesser chance that a wildfire will burn down my house.
Ah, the pleasures of owning a home in California!
Good luck and good trading.
I?ll never forget when my friend, Don Kagin, one of the world?s top dealers in rare coins, walked into the gym one day and announced that he made $1 million that morning.? I enquired ?How is that, pray tell??
He told me that he was an investor and technical consultant to a venture hoping to discover the long lost USS Central America, which sunk in a storm off the Atlantic Coast in 1857, heavily laden with gold from the new state of California.
He just received an excited call that the wreck had been found in deep water off the US east coast.
I learned the other day that Don had scored another bonanza in the rare coins business. He had sold his 1787 Brasher Doubloon for $7.4 million. The price was slightly short of the $7.6 million that a 1933 American $20 gold eagle sold for in 2002.
The Brasher $15 doubloon has long been considered the rarest coin in the United States. Ephraim Brasher, a New York City neighbor of George Washington, was hired to mint the first dollar denominated coins issued by the new republic.
Treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton was so impressed with his work that he appointed Brasher as the official American assayer.
The coin is now so famous that it is featured in a Raymond Chandler novel where the tough private detective, Philip Marlowe, attempts to recover the stolen coin.
The book was made into a 1947 movie, ?The Brasher Doubloon,? starring George Montgomery.
This is not the first time that Don has had a profitable experience with this numismatic treasure. He originally bought it in 1989 for under $1 million, and has made several round trips since then.
The real mystery is who bought it last? Don wouldn?t say, only hinting that it was a big New York hedge fund manager who adores the barbarous relic. He hopes the coin will eventually be placed in a public museum.
Who says the rich aren?t getting richer?
The conspiracy theorists will love this one.
Buried deep in the bowels of the 2,000 page health care bill was a new requirement for gold dealers to file Form 1099's for all retail sales by individuals over $600.
Specifically, the measure can be found in section 9006 of the Patient Protection and Affordability Act of 2010.
For foreign readers unencumbered by such concerns, Internal Revenue Service Form 1099's are required to report miscellaneous income associated with services rendered by independent contractors and self-employed individuals.
The IRS has long despised the barbaric relic (GLD) as an ideal medium to make invisible large transactions. Did you ever wonder what happened to $500, $1,000, $5,000, and $10,000 bills?
The $100,000 bill was only used for reserve transfers between banks, and was never seen by the public. The other high denomination bills were last printed in 1945, and withdrawn from circulation in 1969.
Although the Federal Reserve claims on their website that they were withdrawn because of lack of use, the word at the time was that they disappeared to clamp down on money laundering operations by the mafia.
IN FACT, THE GOAL WAS TO FLUSH OUT MONEY FROM THE REST OF US.
?
Dan Lundgren, a republican from California's 3rd congressional district, a rural gerrymander east of Sacramento that includes the gold bearing Sierras, has introduced legislation to repeal the requirement, claiming that it places an unaffordable burden on small business.
Even the IRS is doubtful that it can initially deal with the tidal wave of paper that the measure would create.
Currency trivia question of the day: whose picture was engraved on the $10,000 bill? You guessed it, Salmon P. Chase, Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury.
Ever Wonder Where The $10,000 Bill Went?
California is called the ?Golden State? for a good reason.
Countless fortunes have been made in mining, farming, real estate, tourism, movie making, aircraft manufacturing, aerospace, and more recently, in technology and pot growing.
The Google (GOOG) and Facebook (FB) IPO?s each minted 1,000 millionaires, and Twitter?s (TWTR) deal is said to have produced 1,600 more.
Recently, a lucky couple found the real thing while hiking ?somewhere in Northern California.?
Spotting an old, rusted out tin can, they started digging. To their utter amazement they uncovered five cans containing 1,427 gold coins worth more than $10 million.
Speculation ran rampant as to the original source of the cache. During the Mexican period prior to 1848, the notorious bandit, Joaquin Murrieta, killed more than 40 people in robberies up and down the state. The booty was never found.
Black Bart waylaid 28 Wells Fargo (WFC) stagecoaches in Northern California in the 1880?s, and said he buried the loot near an old oak tree.
Some even postulated that the coins belonged to the sole surviving member of the Jesse James gang, who retrieved the gold on his release from prison in Missouri and then moved to California.
Things got really interesting when my old friend, Don Kagin of Kagin?s, Inc., got involved (click here for his site).
Don has been the feature of several of my past pieces about rare and exotic coins (click here for ?The Mystery of the Brasher Doubloon?).
After close inspection, Don concluded that the coins were in mint, unissued condition dating from 1847 to 1894. One coin alone, an 1866 Liberty $20 gold piece, is worth more than $1 million.
Don?s take is that the coins were stolen during an inside job at the San Francisco Mint in 1900, one of the few buildings to survive the 1906 earthquake. The surrounding fires burned so hot, that the gold coins inside melted.
The building still stands today. However, it is structurally unsound to continue as a Treasury building, so it is rented out for parties. If that is the case, the coins are still the property of the US government.
But the US Treasury never filed a claim, lacking the documentary evidence dating back to the period.
The government has done this many times in the past, fighting a ten year legal battle to recovers some stolen, unissued 1933 gold double eagle?s, the last minted prior to Franklin Delano Roosevelt?s ban on private gold ownership.
One of these sold for $7,590,000 in 2002, making it the world?s most valuable coin. The government won in that case.
The find sparked a stampede of similar gold seekers, turning hills into suspected neighborhoods into Swiss cheese.
Too bad the lucky hikers didn?t find their cache five years earlier. Since then the price of the barbarous relic has fallen by 45%.
So Hiking Pays Off After All
Now that I see gold closing today at a new six year low today I am reminded of one of the worst calls I have seen in my 50 year trading career.
Of course, readers of this letter have been avoiding the barbarous relic like the plague since I called the top 4 ? years ago.
One of the great asset management blunders of all time has to be the European Community?s decision to sell its gold reserves in the wake of the launch of the Euro in 1998.
The decision led to the fairly rapid sale of 3,800 metric tonnes of the yellow metal at an average price of $280/ounce, reaping about $56 billion, according to the Financial Times.
Today with gold at $1,056/ounce, the stash would be worth $211 billion. On top of this, the Swiss National Bank is poorer by $60 billion, after offloading 1,550 tons of the barbaric relic.
The large scale, indiscriminate selling depressed gold prices in the early part of the last decade, and made the final bottom of a 20-year move down.
It is a classic example of what happens when bureaucrats take over the money management business, ditching the best performing investment on the eve of a long-term bull market. The funds raised were largely placed in poorly performing national Eurobonds.
Where did all that gold go? To hedge funds, gold bugs, and inflationistas of many stripes, despite the fact that long dreaded price hyperinflation never showed.
The good news for gold bugs is that these reserves are largely drawn down now, and future selling will trail off in the years ahead. The shrinking supply can only be positive for prices.
Someday.
?
Never Let a European Civil Servant Trade Your Portfolio
Mad Day Trader Jim Parker is expecting the second quarter of 2014 to be an uneventful, low volume, range trading affair. There is insufficient momentum in the major indexes to substantially break out of the ranges established in Q1.
He does see a modest upward bias to the market. But it is going to have to fight for every point. Sector leadership will change daily, with a brutal rotation. The market is still paying the price of having pulled forward too much performance into 2013.
Jim is a 40-year veteran of the financial markets and has long made a living as an independent trader in the pits at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He has worked his way up from a junior floor runner to advisor to some of the world?s largest hedge funds. We are lucky to have him on our team and gain access to his experience, knowledge, and expertise.
Jim uses a dozen proprietary short-term technical and momentum indicators to generate buy and sell signals. Below are his specific views for the new quarter according to each asset class with specific pivot points.
Stocks ? It will be a ?RISK ON? quarter for equities, but not by much. Stocks are still digesting the meteoric gains of 2013. A solid close in the S&P 500 (SPX) over 1,895 will take us right to 1,950. A failure brings us back to 1,800 quickly. Far more important is the NASDAQ, which has been the lead index for some time now. A convincing break of 3,700 will take us to the old high at 4,800. Old, big tech (XLK) will provide the leadership.
Bonds ? Are not going anywhere and Jim is a better seller of rallies. The 30-year futures contract is providing the guidance here, and it has been acting particularly poorly. The flattening of the yield curve has been one of the most dramatic in recent memory. If the (TLT) breaks the 50-day moving average at $107, the next stop will be $105. Demolish that, and we plunge to $101, which equates to a 3.05% yield on the ten year Treasury bond.
Foreign Currencies - The big focus of the currency markets now is to be long the British pound (FXB) and short the Japanese yen (FXY). It would be best to buy the cross, but the individual legs should work as well, as I have done in my The Mad Hedge Fund Trader?s model trading portfolio with a short yen position. The Australian dollar (FXA) decisively broke $91.50 to the upside and is now targeting $93. You should buy any pullbacks to $91.50, as long as central bank governor George Stevens keeps his mouth shut. The Euro (FXE) will be a safer sell after this week?s ECB meeting in order to avoid an ambush from president Mario Draghi.
Precious Metals - Gold (GLD) looks terrible and should be avoided at all costs. Gold bugs would be better off finding a long dark cave and hiding. We are dead in the middle of a six-month range and are likely to test the bottom at $1,200 next. Only a major rally would negate this view. As for silver (SLV), it is dead in the water, so don?t bother.
Energy - Oil (USO) looks sickly as well, now that the boost we got from the Crimean crisis is fading. The $92-$107 range continues. Get a good break of $98.50 and it will target $92. Jim is a better seller of Texas tea than a buyer. Jim also wants to sell the next decent rally in natural gas (UNG) going into the summer, looking for surging fracking supplies to swamp the market by then.
Ags - Soybeans (SOYB) are definitely the crop of the year, and the ETF could easily tack on another 10% from here. Corn (CORN) got a boost from yesterday?s bullish USDA report and could follow through. Only wheat (WEAT) is looking poorly from a technical perspective, and lacks the global fundamentals to help it.
Volatility - Buy the dips and sell the rips. The current $13 low is attractive, and Jim expects it to trade as high $22 sometime in Q2 if we break resistance at $15.50. A long VIX position also makes a nice hedge for your other ?RISK ON? positions as well.
If you are not already getting Jim?s dynamite Mad Day Trader service, please get yourself the unfair advantage you deserve. Just email Nancy in customer support at support@madhedgefundtrader.com and ask how to upgrade your existing Global Trading Dispatch service for an additional $1,000 a year.
Bad China data?.Russia threatens the Ukraine?.more bad China data?.maneuvers at the Russia-Crimea border. The bull has been punched out with a market that was down every day last week, China and Russia both taking turns thrashing investors, like tag team wrestlers. When will it end?
The canaries in the coal mine will be found in the charts below. This is where you will first hear the all-clear signal, when it is safe to return with an aggressive ?RISK ON? posture.
As always, watch the bond market. If the current rally in the (TLT) fails anywhere short of $110, it?s a sign that traders are fleeing the safety of the Treasury bond market and are happy to return to riskier assets, like equities. That equates to a ten year Treasury bond yield of just over 2.50%. A breakout of prices above this, and yields below suggest that more trouble is coming.
Keep close tabs on the Chinese Yuan (CYB). After an unrelenting five-year appreciation, it started a swan dive two weeks ago. That is when a banking crises in the Middle Kingdom started picking up steam. This prompted currency traders to unload Chinese renminbi for more stable dollars. The collapse of copper mirrors this. New signs of life in the Yuan and copper will hint that trouble there is over for now.
The Japanese yen is another big one to monitor. Most hedge funds borrow yen and sell them to finance long positions around the world. This is why the yen has been perennially week for the past two years. But when they dump these positions and hide under their beds, the reverse happens.
They buy back their yen shorts, pushing it up. That?s why the latest round of jitters has the Japanese currency probing four-month highs. If the yen fails here, it?s because investors are going back into the market for other assets.
Of course, the Russian stock market (RSX) is a no brainer to watch. Thanks to the antics of Vladimir Putin, it is down 28% so far in 2014, making it the world?s worst performing market this year. Invading your neighbors and threatening to incite WWIII is not good for your equities. I doubt he cares, but emerging market investors do.
Gold (GLD) is certainly earning its pay as a flight to safety instrument. It has been flying like a bat out of hell all year and is now testing major resistance. If the barbarous relic suddenly loses its luster, the memo will go out to buy paper assets once more.
Finally, keep the chart for the Volatility Index (VIX) planted on the top of your screen. Recent tops have been around the $21 level, only $3 higher than the current level. When cooler heads prevail, the (VIX) will collapse once again. Puts on the (VXX) are the way to play this move.
The interesting thing about these charts is that they are all moving to the extreme edges of multi month ranges. So we could be one more flush away from the end of this move.
That?s unless Russia really does invade Crimea in force. Then all bets are off.
This a Sell Signal
Following Howard Ruff for the last 40 years has always been eye opening, if not entertaining. The irascible Mormon is the publisher of Ruff Times, one of the oldest investment letters in the business, and one of the original worshipers of hard assets.
Ruff says that any investment denominated in dollars is a mistake, which is in a long term down trend, along with all paper assets. Silver (SLV) is his first choice, which will outperform gold, and eventually top $100 from the current $22. His personal target for the barbarous relic (GLD) is $2,300, but that might prove conservative.
With the Chinese building 100 nuclear power plants over the next ten years, uranium (CCJ), (NLR) has great potential. Equities may never come back from their lost decade. Don?t buy ETF?s because they are just another form of paper, and may not actually own the gold or silver they claim. The government is laying the foundation for a massive inflation, which will begin soon.
Howard has long been considered a card-carrying member of the lunatic fringe of the investment world, sticking with hard assets throughout their 20 year bear market during the eighties and nineties, and annually predicting the demise of the federal government.
Maybe it?s a case of a broken clock being right twice a day, but in recent years I find myself agreeing with Howard more and more. Whether that means I?m now a lunatic too, only time will tell.
We sit here in the calm before the storm awaiting the Federal Reserve?s decision to taper a little, a lot, or not at all. Every asset class on the planet is in a holding pattern until then. So I?ll take this opportunity to review the current state of play in gold (GLD).
Since it peaked in the summer of 2011, the barbarous relic has been beaten like the proverbial red headed stepchild, dragging silver (SLV) down with it. It now appears to be facing a perfect storm.
If the Fed doesn?t taper today, it will shortly. That will bring us rising interest rates, raising the opportunist cost of own non-interest bearing assets for the first time in six years. Gold is at the top of that list.
Gold has traditionally been sought after as an inflation hedge. But with jobs growth weak, wages stagnant, and much work still being outsourced abroad, rapid price increases are nowhere on the horizon. Unless, of course, you drive a gas-guzzler, which I don?t.
The biggest buyers of gold in the world, the Indians, have seen their purchasing power drop by half, thanks to the collapse of the rupee against the US dollar. The government there is now threatening to increase taxes once again in order to staunch precious capital outflows. That?s why Indian gold imports fell by a stunning 95% last month to a mere 2 ? metric tones.
You can also blame the China slowdown for declining interest in the yellow metal, which is now in its fourth year of falling economic growth. Chart gold against the Shanghai index, and the similarity is striking.
The brief bid gold caught this summer over war fears in Syria was worth an impressive $250 rise. But the diplomats then got involved and hostilities were taken off the table, or at least delayed. That caused gold to roll over like the Bismarck.
Can?t the metal catch a break?
With conditions this grim, you?d think the price of gold was going to zero. It?s not. While now one was looking, the average price of gold production has soared from $5 in 1920 to $1,300 today. Over the last 100 years, the price of producing gold has risen four times faster than the underlying metal. It?s almost as if the gold mining industry is the only one in the world which sees real inflation, which has seen costs soar at a 15% annual rate for the past five years.
This is a function of what I call ?peak gold.? They?re not making it anymore. Miners are increasingly being driven to higher risk, more expensive parts of the world to find the stuff. You know those tires on heavy dump trucks? They now cost $200,000 and buyers face a three-year waiting list to buy one. Barrick Gold (ABX) isn?t mining at 15,000 feet in the Andes, where freezing water is a major problem, because they like the fresh air.
What this means is that when the spot price of gold falls below the cost of production, miners will simply shout down their most marginal facilities, drying up supply. They can still operate, and older mines carry costs that go all the way down to $600. No one is going to want to supply the sparkly stuff at a loss. That should prevent gold from falling dramatically from here.
I am constantly barraged with emails from gold bugs who passionately argue that their beloved metal is trading at a tiny fraction of its true value, and that the barbaric relic is really worth $5,000, $10,000, or even $50,000 an ounce (GLD). They claim the move in the yellow metal we are seeing is only the beginning of a 30 fold rise in prices similar to what we saw from 1972 to 1979, when it leapt from $32 to $950.
So when the chart below popped up in my in-box showing the gold backing of the US monetary base, I felt obligated to pass it on to you to illustrate one of the intellectual arguments these people are using. To match the 1936 monetary value peak, when the monetary base was collapsing, and the double top in 1979 when gold futures first tickled $950, this precious metal has to increase in value by eight times, or to $9,600 an ounce.
I am long term bullish on gold, other precious metals, and virtually all commodities for that matter. But I am not that bullish. It makes my own $2,300 prediction positively wimp-like by comparison. The seven year spike up in prices we saw in the seventies, which found me in a very long line in Johannesburg, South Africa to unload my own krugerrands in 1979, was triggered by a number of one off events that will never be repeated.
Some 40 years of demand was unleashed when Richard Nixon took the US off the gold standard and decriminalized private ownership in 1972. Inflation then peaked around 20%. Newly enriched sellers of oil had a strong historical affinity with gold. South Africa, the world?s largest gold producer, was then a boycotted international pariah and teetering on the edge of disaster. We are nowhere near the same geopolitical neighborhood today, and hence my more subdued forecast. But then again, I could be wrong.
In the end, gold may have to wait for a return of inflation to resume its push to new highs. The last bear market in gold lasted 18 years, from 1980 to 1998, so don?t hold your breath.
What should we look for? When your friends start getting surprise, out of the blue pay increases, the largest component of the inflation calculation. That is happening now in the technology and the new US oil fields, but nowhere else. It could be a long wait, possibly into the 2020?s, until the wage hikes spread elsewhere.
You may have noticed that I have not been doing much trading in gold or the other precious metals lately, except from the short side. That is because they are still working off a multiyear overbought condition. Given some time, and a solid floor under prices, and I?ll be back there in a heartbeat.
You?ll be the first to know when that happens.
