Global Market Comments
December 4, 2023
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
Featured Trade:
(The Mad Hedge December Traders & Investors Summit is ON!)
(MARKET OUTLOOK FOR THE WEEK AHEAD, or GOLDILOCKS IS BACK!),
(TLT), (FCX), (CAT), (JNK), (HYG), (NLY), (GM), (MSFT), (NLY), (BRK/B), (CCJ), (GOOGL), (SNOW), (XOM), (CRM)
After too long of an absence, Goldilocks has moved back in once again. She arrived with Santa Claus too, a month ahead of schedule.
Can life get any better than that, Goldilocks and Santa Claus?
Santa confused Thanksgiving with Christmas this year. I saw it coming a mile off, and it’s not because my failing eyesight has suddenly improved.
Since October 26, Mad Hedge followers have earned an impressive 25%. We are on track to top an 86.5% profit for 2023, the best in the 15-year history of the service.
Concierge members who own our substantial LEAPS portfolio, now at 33 names, are up much more.
I hate to boast but let me take my victory lap. I earned it.
Stocks and bonds should continue rising but at a much slower rate. More likely is the diversification of the rally from Big Tech and big bonds (TLT) to medium tech, commodities (FCX), industrials (CAT), junk bonds (JNK), (HYG), and REITS (NLY).
Buy everything on dips.
And here are your assumptions. Collapsing energy prices will lead the inflation rate down to the Fed’s well-publicized 2% inflation rate target in the coming months. Accelerating technology and AI will reign in this year’s runaway wage increases, if not reverse them.
The UAW’s 25% salary increase over four years will only hasten the demise of General Motors (GM), as well as their own. Interest rates have to take a swan dive, supercharging all risk assets.
Goldilocks is not moving in for a fling, but a long-term relationship. Your retirement funds will love it.
Last spring, with 75 feet of snow over the winter, the rivers pouring out of the High Sierras were at record levels. That brought the solo hobbyist gold miners out in force.
It is widely believed that the 1849 gold rush extracted only 10% of the gold in the mountains and the remaining 90% is still up there. Heavy rainfalls like we received last winter flushed out some of the rest.
Rounding a turn in the river, I spotted a group of modern-day 49ers equipped with shoulder-high waders and inner tubes floating pumps and sluice boxes. So I parked the car and waded out in the freezing, fast-running water to get an update on this market.
One man proudly showed off a one-ounce gold nugget that he had found only that morning worth about $1,800. Nuggets are worth more than spot gold because they attract a collector’s market.
A record eight-ounce nugget was discovered in a river near Merced the week earlier. This year, the state government in Sacramento issued a record number of gold mining licenses.
I explained to my newfound friend that he should hang on to his gold because it would be worth a lot more the following year. Inflation was falling and that would eventually induce the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates sharply.
That meant less interest rate competition for gold and silver, which yielded nothing taking prices upward. Personally, I think this gold could hit $3,000 an ounce and silver $50 an ounce in 2025.
In addition, there was a constant bid from Russia, China, and North Korea looking to dodge financial sanctions. Money managers are also picking up the yellow metal as a hedge against any unanticipated volatility in 2024.
My friend looked at me quizzically, wondering if perhaps I was some kind of nutjob who had waded out mid-river to rob him of his prized nugget.
I’ll do anything to gain a trading edge, even freezing off my cajones.
It was a tough week for 90- and 100-year-olds with the passing of Charlie Munger, Henry Kissinger, and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. I had the privilege of knowing all three.
I was in the White House Press Room one day when the press secretary James Brady asked if any of the press could ride a horse. Sheepishly, I was the only one to raise a hand.
I was ordered to pick up my riding boots and report to the White House Stables on 17th Street. I had no idea why. Back then, even the press didn’t ask some questions.
When I arrived, I understood why. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was already there kitted out ready to ride. It turns out that the justice from Arizona rode weekly with Ronald Reagan. This week, an international crisis prevented the president from doing so. I was the fill-in escort.
We talked about growing up in the Colorado Desert, and pre-air conditioning, as we enjoyed a peaceful ride along the Potomac River. A security detail kept a safe distance.
A lot of history is being in the right place at the right time.
The clock is ticking.
November closed out at +15.54%. My 2023 year-to-date performance is still at an eye-popping +81.71%. The S&P 500 (SPY) is up +19.73% so far in 2023. My trailing one-year return reached +80.80% versus +18.19% for the S&P 500.
That brings my 15-year total return to +678.90%. My average annualized return has exploded to +52.26%, another new high, some 2.48 times the S&P 500 over the same period.
I am 90% fully invested, with longs in (MSFT), (NLY), (BRK/B), (CCJ), (GOOGL), (SNOW), (CAT), and (XOM). I have one short in the (TLT). I took profits on (CRM) on Friday.
Some 56 of my 61 trades this year have been profitable this year.
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, December 4, at 8:30 AM EST, the US Factory Orders are out.
On Tuesday, December 5 at 2:30 PM, the JOLTS Job Openings Report is released.
On Wednesday, December 6 at 8:30 AM, the ADP Private Employment Report is published.
On Thursday, December 7 at 8:30 AM, the Weekly Jobless Claims are announced.
On Friday, December 8 at 2:00 PM the Baker Hughes Rig Count is printed and at 2:30 PM, the November Nonfarm Payroll Report is published.
As for me, back in the early 1980s, when I was starting up Morgan Stanley’s international equity trading desk, my wife Kyoko was still a driven Japanese career woman.
Taking advantage of her near-perfect English, she landed a prestige job as the head of sales at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel.
Every morning we set off on our different ways, me to Morgan Stanley’s HQ in the old General Motors Building on Avenue of the Americas and 47th street and she to the Waldorf at Park and 34th.
One day, she came home and told me this little old lady living in the Waldorf Towers needed an escort to walk her dog in the evenings once a week. Back in those days, the crime rate in New York was sky-high, and only the brave or the reckless ventured outside after dark.
I said “Sure” “What was her name?”
Jean MacArthur.
I said THE Jean MacArthur?
She answered “Yes.”
Jean MacArthur was the widow of General Douglas MacArthur, the WWII legend. He fought off the Japanese in the Philippines in 1941 and retreated to Australia in a dramatic night PT Boat escape.
He then led a brilliant island-hopping campaign, turning the Japanese at Guadalcanal and New Guinea. My dad was part of that operation, as were the fathers of many of my Australian clients. That led all the way to Tokyo Bay where MacArthur accepted the Japanese in 1945 on the deck of the battleship USS Missouri.
The MacArthur then moved into the Tokyo embassy where the general ran Japan as a personal fiefdom for seven years, a residence I know well. That’s when Jean, who was 18 years the general’s junior, developed a fondness for the Japanese people.
When the Korean War began in 1950, MacArthur took charge. His landing at Inchon Harbor broke the back of the invasion and was one of the most brilliant tactical moves in military history. When MacArthur was recalled by President Truman in 1952, he had not been home for 13 years.
So it was with some trepidation that I was introduced by my wife to Mrs. MacArthur in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria. On the way out, we passed a large portrait of the general who seemed to disapprovingly stare down at me taking out his wife, so I was on my best behavior.
To some extent, I had spent my entire life preparing for this job.
I had stayed at the MacArthur Suite at the Manila Hotel where they had lived before the war. I knew Australia well. And I had just spent a decade living in Japan. By chance, I had also read the brilliant biography of MacArthur by William Manchester, American Caesar, which had only just come out.
I also competed in karate at the national level in Japan for ten years, which qualified me as a bodyguard. In other words, I was the perfect after-dark escort for Midtown Manhattan in the early eighties.
She insisted I call her “Jean”; she was one of the most gregarious women I have ever run into. She was grey-haired, petite, and made you feel like you were the most important person she had ever run into.
She talked a lot about “Doug” and I learned several personal anecdotes that never made it into the history books.
“Doug” was a staunch conservative who was nominated for president by the Republican party in 1944. But he pushed policies in Japan that would have qualified him as a raging liberal.
It was the Japanese that begged MacArthur to ban the army and the navy in the new constitution for they feared a return of the military after MacArthur left. Women gained the right to vote on the insistence of the English tutor for Emperor Hirohito’s children, an American Quaker woman. He was very pro-union in Japan. He also pushed through land reform that broke up the big estates and handed out land to the small farmers.
It was a vast understatement to say that I got more out of these walks than she did. While making our rounds, we ran into other celebrities who lived in the neighborhood who all knew Jean, such as Henry Kissinger, Ginger Rogers, and the UN Secretary-General.
Morgan Stanley eventually promoted me and transferred me to London to run the trading operations there, so my prolonged free history lesson came to an end.
Jean MacArthur stayed in the public eye and was a frequent commencement speaker at West Point where “Doug” had been a student and later the superintendent. Jean died in 2000 at the age of 101.
I sent a bouquet of lilies to the funeral.
Kyoko passed away in 2002.
In 2014, Chinas Anbang Insurance Group bought the Waldorf Astoria for $1.95 billion, making it the most expensive hotel ever sold. Most of the rooms were converted to condominiums and sold to Chinese looking to hide assets abroad.
The portrait of Douglas MacArthur is gone too. During the Korean War, he threatened to drop atomic bombs on China’s major coastal cities.
Good Luck and Good Trading,
John Thomas
CEO & Publisher
The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader
Mad Hedge Technology Letter
December 1, 2023
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(THE PLACE TO BE)
(AMZN), (ZS), (CRM), (GOOGL)
Dealing with the Cloud works, and for every relevant tech company, this division serves as the pipeline to the CEO position.
If this isn’t the case for a tech company, then there’s something egregiously wrong with them!
Take Andy Jassy, the mastermind behind Amazon’s (AMZN) lucrative cloud computing division and the man who succeeded company founder Jeff Bezos.
He was rewarded with this important position based on his performance in the cloud and faced the daunting proposition of following Bezos as CEO.
Bezos incorporated Amazon almost 30 years ago.
Jassy developed a highly profitable and market-leading business, Amazon Web Services, that runs data centers serving a wide range of corporate computing needs.
Cloud 101
If you've been living under a rock for the past few years, the cloud phenomenon hasn't passed you by and you still have time to cash in.
You want to hitch your wagon to cloud-based investments in any way, shape, or form.
Amazon leads the cloud industry it created.
It still maintains more than 30% of the cloud market. Microsoft would need to gain a lot of ground to even come close to this jewel of a business.
Amazon relies on AWS to underpin the rest of its businesses and that is why AWS contributes most of Amazon's total operating income.
Total revenue for just the AWS division would operate as a healthy stand-alone tech company if need be.
The future is about the cloud.
These days, the average investor probably hears about the cloud a dozen times a day.
If you work in Silicon Valley, you can quadruple that figure.
So, before we get deep into the weeds with this letter on cloud services, cloud fundamentals, cloud plays, and cloud Trade Alerts, let's get into the basics of what the cloud actually is.
Think of this as a cloud primer.
It's important to understand the cloud, both its strengths and limitations.
Giant companies that have it figured out, such as Salesforce (CRM) and Zscaler (ZS), are some of the fastest-growing companies in the world.
Understand the cloud and you will readily identify its bottlenecks and bulges that can lead to extreme investment opportunities. And that is where I come in.
Cloud storage refers to the online space where you can store data. It resides across multiple remote servers housed inside massive data centers all over the country, some as large as football fields, often in rural areas where land, labor, and electricity are cheap.
They are built using virtualization technology, which means that storage space spans many different servers and multiple locations. If this sounds crazy, remember that the original Department of Defense packet-switching design was intended to make the system atomic bomb-proof.
As a user, you can access any single server at any one time anywhere in the world. These servers are owned, maintained, and operated by giant third-party companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet (GOOGL), which may or may not charge a fee for using them.
The most important features of cloud storage are:
1) It is a service provided by an external provider.
2) All data is stored outside your computer residing inside an in-house network.
3) A simple Internet connection will allow you to access your data at any time from anywhere.
4) Because of all these features, sharing data with others is vastly easier, and you can even work with multiple people online at the same time, making it the perfect, collaborative vehicle for our globalized world.
Once you start using the cloud to store a company's data, the benefits are many.
No Maintenance
Many companies, regardless of their size, prefer to store data inside in-house servers and data centers.
However, these require constant 24-hour-a-day maintenance, so the company has to employ a large in-house IT staff to manage them - a costly proposition.
Thanks to cloud storage, businesses can save costs on maintenance since their servers are now the headache of third-party providers.
Instead, they can focus resources on the core aspects of their business where they can add the most value, without worrying about managing the IT staff of prima donnas.
Greater Flexibility
Today's employees want to have a better work/life balance and this goal can be best achieved by letting them work remotely which effectively happened because of the public health situation. Increasingly, workers are bending their jobs to fit their lifestyles, and that is certainly the case here at Mad Hedge Fund Trader.
How else can I send off a Trade Alert while hanging from the face of a Swiss Alp?
Cloud storage services, such as Google Drive, offer exactly this kind of flexibility for employees.
With data stored online, it's easy for employees to log into a cloud portal, work on the data they need to, and then log off when they're done. This way a single project can be worked on by a global team, the work handed off from time zone to time zone until it's done.
It also makes them work more efficiently, saving money for penny-pinching entrepreneurs.
Better Collaboration and Communication
In today's business environment, it's common practice for employees to collaborate and communicate with co-workers located around the world.
For example, they may have to work on the same client proposal together or provide feedback on training documents. Cloud-based tools from DocuSign, Dropbox, and Google Drive make collaboration and document management a piece of cake.
These products, which all offer free entry-level versions, allow users to access the latest versions of any document so they can stay on top of real-time changes which can help businesses to better manage workflow, regardless of geographical location.
Data Protection
Another important reason to move to the cloud is for better protection of your data, especially in the event of a natural disaster. Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc on local data centers in New York City, forcing many websites to shut down their operations for days.
And we haven’t talked about the ransomware attacks by Eastern Europeans on energy company Colonial Pipeline and meat producer JBS Foods.
The cloud simply routes traffic around problem areas as if, yes, they have just been destroyed by a nuclear attack.
It's best to move data to the cloud, to avoid such disruptions because there your data will be stored in multiple locations.
This redundancy makes it so that even if one area is affected, your operations don't have to capitulate, and data remains accessible no matter what happens. It's a system called deduplication.
Lower Overhead
The cloud can save businesses a lot of money.
By outsourcing data storage to cloud providers, businesses save on capital and maintenance costs, money that in turn can be used to expand the business. Setting up an in-house data center requires tens of thousands of dollars in investment, and that's not to mention the maintenance costs it carries.
Plus, considering the security, reduced lag, up-time, and controlled environments that providers such as Amazon's AWS have, creating an in-house data center seems about as contemporary as a buggy whip, a corset, or a Model T.
The cloud is where you want to be.
Global Market Comments
November 27, 2023
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(MARKET OUTLOOK FOR THE WEEK AHEAD, or MELT UP),
(MSFT), (NLY), (BRK/B), (CCJ), (CRM), (GOOGL), (SNOW), (CAT), (XOM), (TLT)
If you think the market performance for the past month has been spectacular, you have seen nothing yet. We have two major positive catalysts that are about to hit stock prices.
On December 10, we will see a lower-than-expected Consumer Price Index, driving yet another stake through the heart of inflation. On December 13, we will also be greeted with a Federal Reserve decision to keep interest rates unchanged, as they will do over the next several meetings.
“Higher for shorter” is about to become the new market mantra.
That will give the market the shot in the arm it needs to reach my $4,800 yearend target, which was precisely the goal I laid out on January 1. Caution has been thrown to the wind and hedging downside risks has become a distant memory. One of the fastest market melt-ups in 100 years will do that. Complacency is the order of the day.
Equity-oriented mutual funds have seen $43 billion in inflows so far in November. Commodity Trading Funds, or CTA’s, have seen a breathtaking $60 billion piled into long equity strategies.
Hedge funds flipped from short to long and now have the most aggressively bullish positions in 22 years, mostly in big tech. All of this has taken the Volatility Index (VIX) down to a subterranean $12 handle. Bears are suddenly lonely….and afraid.
Yes, 55 years of practice makes this easy.
On October 28, it turns out that we reached a decade-high peak in bond investment when Treasuries were flirting with new highs in yields. With perfect rear-view mirror hindsight that’s when many investors cut stock holdings to the bone. They will spend the next several months desperately trying to get back in.
Oh yes, and Company buybacks are about to surge as companies race to pick up their own stocks before the yearend deadline. Apple is the top buyback stock followed by Alphabet (GOOGL) and Microsoft (MSFT). Heard these names before?
And while big tech is starting to look expensive, they are cheap when you factor in the trillions of dollars in profits that are headed their way over the next decade.
That’s what always happens.
What could pee on my victory parade? Ten-year US treasury bonds revisiting a 5.08% yield, crude oil popping back up to $100 a barrel, oil another new blacking swan alighting out of the blue, like a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, or Russia retaking the Baltic states. That’s all.
Avoid these and stocks will continue to rise, as will your retirement funds.
The Magnificent Seven will continue to lead, as will big financials, which are still at bargain-basement levels. Energy and commodities are already posting January sale prices, discounting a 2024 recession that isn’t going to happen. This is fertile LEAPS territory.
Weekly Jobless Claims Drop 24,000, to 209,000 in one of the sharpest declines this year. It makes last week’s jump look like an anomaly.
Consumer Inflation Expectations Rise, to 3.2%, a 12-year high. They are counting on a 4.5% in 2024. They are now looking at gasoline prices. There’s your mismatch. Any decline in inflation will be viewed as a shocker and drive share prices to new all-time highs.
US Gasoline Prices Hit Three-Year Low, on recession fears and replacement concerns by EVs. Energy stocks are tracing the downside tic for tic, pulling down all other commodities. Don’t buy this dip.
Pending Home Sales Plunge to 13-Year Low, down 4.1% in October, on a signed contracts basis. Sales were down 14.6% year over year. The median price of an existing home sold in October was $391,800, an increase of 3.4% from October 2022. These are the last poor sales numbers before the collapse in interest rates. At the end of October, there were 1.15 million homes for sale, down 5.7% from a year earlier. This is about half as many homes as were available for sale pre-Covid. At the current sales pace, that represents a 3.6-month supply. A six-month supply is considered a balanced market between buyer and seller.
Monster Pay Hikes Will Lead to Strong Japanese Yen, with whiskey maker Suntory offering 7% pay hikes. The prospect of falling US interest rates adds fuel to the fire. Buy (FXY) on dips.
Starship Two Blows Up, two minutes or 92 miles after launch. The test fire of the 33-engine spacecraft was considered a success. The massive 397-foot tall, 30-foot-wide rocket, the largest ever built, is crucial for the NASA moon launch in 2025 and the SpaceX Mars trip further down the road.
NVIDIA (NVDA) Beats, with a profit triple, but that stock sells off 6% on the news. It was a classic buy the rumor, sell the news move. Future earnings increases will not be as big. Keep "buy (NVDA) on dips" as a must-own.
Famed Short Seller Jim Chanos shut down after a massive short in Tesla shares blew up. His funds under management have plunged from $6 billion to $200 million since (TSLA) went public. Chanos had a few big wins, notably Enron in 2001. But he was also seen as a hedge against other long positions.
So far in November, we are up +12.62%. My 2023 year-to-date performance is still at an eye-popping +78.79%. The S&P 500 (SPY) is up +19.73% so far in 2023. My trailing one-year return reached +81.00% versus +18.91% for the S&P 500.
That brings my 15-year total return to +675.98%. My average annualized return has exploded to +48.57%, another new high, some 2.49 times the S&P 500 over the same period.
I am 100% fully invested, with longs in (MSFT), (NLY), (BRK/B), (CCJ), (CRM), (GOOGL), (SNOW), (CAT), and (XOM). I have one short in the (TLT).
Some 66 of my 61 trades this year have been profitable.
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, November 27, at 8:30 AM EST, the New Home Sales are out.
On Tuesday, November 28 at 2:30 PM, the S&P National Home Price Index is released.
On Wednesday, November 29 at 8:30 AM, the Q2 GDP Growth Rate is published.
On Thursday, November 30 at 8:30 AM, the Weekly Jobless Claims are announced.
On Friday, December 1 at 2:30 PM, the October ISM Manufacturing Index is published. At 2:00 PM the Baker Hughes Rig Count is printed.
As for me, When I landed in Tokyo in 1974, there were very few foreigners in the country. The WWII occupation forces had left, but the international business community had yet to arrive. You met a lot of guys who used to work for Douglas MacArthur.
There was only one way to stay more than 90 days on the standard tourist visa. That was to get another visa to study “Japanese culture.” There were only two choices: flower arranging or karate.
Since this was at the height of Bruce Lee’s career, I went for karate.
It was not an easy choice.
World War II was not that distant, and there were still hundreds of army veterans missing limbs begging for money under railroad overpasses. Some back then were still fighting on remote Pacific islands.
Many in the karate community believed that the art was a national secret and should never be taught to foreigners. So those who entered this tight-knit community paid the price and had the daylights beaten out of them. I was one of those.
To this day, I am missing five of my original teeth. There is nothing like taking a kick to the mouth and watching your front teeth fly across the dojo, skittering on the teak floor.
We trained three hours a day, five days a week. It involved punching a bloody hardwood makiwara at least 200 times. The beginners were paired with black belts who thoroughly worked us over. Then the entire class met up at a nearby public bath to soak in a piping hot ofuro. You always hurt.
During the dead of winter, we ran five miles around the Imperial Palace in our karate gi’s barefoot in freezing temperatures daily. Then we were hosed down with cold water and trained for three hours.
During this time, I was infused with the spirit of bushido, the thousand-year-old Japanese warrior code. I learned self-discipline, stamina, and concentration. In the end, karate is a form of meditation.
Knowing you’re indestructible and unassailable is not such a bad thing, especially when you’re traveling in some of the harsher parts of the world. When muggers in bad neighborhoods see me late at night, they cross the street to avoid me. I am not a guy to mess with. Utter fearlessness is a great asset to possess.
The highlight of the annual training schedule was the All-Japan Karate Championship held in the prestigious Budokan, headquarters of all Japanese martial arts near the ghostly Yasukuni Jinja, Japan’s National Cemetery. By my last year in Japan, I had my black belt, and my instructor, Higaona Sensei, urged me to enter.
Because I had such a long reach, incredibly, I made it to the finals. I was matched with a very tough-looking six-footer who was fighting for Japan’s national prestige, as no foreigner had ever won the contest.
I punched, he kicked, fist met foot, and foot won. My left wrist was broken. My opponent knew what happened and graciously let me fight on one hand for another minute to save face. Then he knocked me out on points.
The crowds roared.
It’s all part of a full life.
Losing the All-Japan National Karate Championship
1974 Higaona Sensei
Stay Healthy,
John Thomas
CEO & Publisher
The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader
Global Market Comments
November 14, 2023
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(WHY YOU WILL LOSE YOU JOB IN THE NEXT FIVE YEARS, AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT),
(INTU), (AMZN), (GOOGL), (TSLA), (BLK), (HRB)
Yes, it’s happening.
And if you lose your job to AI in five years you will be one of the lucky ones.
It’s possible that your job is already gone, they just haven’t told you yet.
The shocking conclusion I am getting from dozens of research fronts is that artificial intelligence and automation are accelerating far faster than anyone realizes.
It is all extraordinarily disruptive.
This will cause corporate profits to rocket and share prices to soar but at the price of higher nationwide political instability.
A big leap took place at the beginning of the year when suddenly it appeared that everything got a lot smarter.
My local Safeway has started using self-checkout scanners to enable customers to avoid the long lines still operated by humans.
I hate them because I can never get them to scan pineapples correctly.
Soon, Amazon (AMZN) opened a supermarket in Seattle where there is no checkout stand at all. You simply just pick up whatever products you want, and it will scan them all on the way out to the parking lot.
Once the software is perfected (it is self-learning), and the consumers are educated, 5 million checkout clerks will be joining the unemployment lines.
Uber has been testing self-driving taxis in Phoenix, AZ, with sometimes humorous results. It seems that other human-driven cars like crashing into them. There has been one fatality so far when the human safety driver was caught texting.
When they figure this out, probably in two years, 180,000 taxi drivers and 600,000 Uber and Lyft drivers will have to hit the road.
Some 3 million truck drivers will be right behind them.
Notice that I am only a couple of paragraphs into this peace and already 8,780,000 jobs are about to imminently disappear out of a total of 150 million in the US.
Two decades from now, only vintage car collectors or the very poor will be driving their cars if Tesla (TSLA) has anything to do with it.
I let my Model X drive me around most of the time. It has reaction time, night vision, and a 360-degree radar system that are far better than my 71-year-old senses.
However, all new Teslas now come equipped with the hardware to use it. They are all only one surprise overnight software upgrade away from the future.
And it's not just the low-end high school dropout jobs that are being thrown in the dustbin of history.
Automation is now rapidly moving up the value chain.
A rising share of online news is machine-generated and is targeting you based on your browsing history. You just didn’t know it.
It was a major influence in the last election.
Blackrock (BLK), the largest fund manager in the country, has announced that it is laying off dozens of stock analysts and turning to algorithms to manage its vast $8.6 trillion in assets under management.
As the April 15 tax deadline relentlessly approaches, you are probably totally unaware that an algorithm prepared your return, particularly if you use a low-end service like H & R Block (HRB) or Intuit’s (INTU) TurboTax.
Because of the simultaneous convergence of multiple technologies, half of all current jobs will likely disappear over the next 20 years.
If this sounds alarming, don’t worry.
We’ve been through all of this before.
From 1900 to 1950 farmers fell from 40% to 2% of the labor force. The food output of that 2% has tripled over the last 60 years, thanks to improved seed varieties and farming methods.
The remaining 38% didn’t starve.
They retrained for the emerging growth industries of the day, automobiles, aircraft, and radio.
But there had to be a lot of pain along the way.
More recently, some 30% of all job descriptions listed on the Department of Labor website today didn’t exist 20 years ago.
Yes, disruption happens fast.
And here’s where it gets personal.
Since I implemented an AI-driven, self-learning Mad Hedge Market Timing algorithm to assist me in my own Trade Alert service six months ago, MY PERFORMANCE HAS ROCKETED, FROM A 21% ANNUAL RATE TO 51%!
As a result, YOU have been crying all the way to the bank!
The proof is all in the numbers (see chart below).
Those trading without the tailwind of algorithms today suddenly find the world a very surprising and confusing place.
They lose money too.
The investment implications of all of this are nothing less than mind-boggling.
Wages are almost always the largest cost for any business, especially the labor-intensive ones like retailing, fast food, and restaurants.
Reduce your largest expense by 90% or more, and the drop through to the bottom line will be enormous.
Stock markets have already noticed.
Maybe this is why price-earnings multiples are trading at a multi-decade high of 19.5X.
Perhaps, the markets know something that we mere humans don’t?
It also is the largest budgetary item in any government-supplied service.
I bet that half of the country’s 7 million teaching jobs will be gone in a decade, taken over by much cheaper online programs.
Today, my kids do their homework on their iPhones, complete class projects on Google Docs, and get a report card that is updated and emailed to me daily.
They’re probably to last generation to ever go to a physical school.
(That’s life. Just as the cost of driving them to school every day becomes free, they don’t have to go anymore).
You can always adopt a “King Canute” strategy and order the tide not to rise.
Or, you can rapidly adapt, as I did.
The choice is yours.
Mad Hedge Technology Letter
November 13, 2023
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(RIDE THE NVIDIA AND AMD ROLLER COASTER)
(NVDA), (AMD), (ORCL), (GOOGL), (AMZN)
It’s scary when the best chip company in the world rolls out new products.
It’s scary because others can’t compete and they get left further behind.
It’s scary because the high level of technology facilitates another new wave of technological expertise in other companies from the software and hardware side.
These new products are almost always faster, more efficient, and better than the previous products catalyzing a snowball effect that lifts everybody’s revenue.
This type of outstanding performance of late is the reason that made Nvidia (NVDA) into the world’s most valuable chipmaker and they have announced they are updating its H100 artificial intelligence processor, adding more capabilities to a product that has fueled its dominance in the AI computing market.
The new model, called the H200, will get the ability to use high-bandwidth memory, or HBM3e, allowing it to better cope with the large data sets needed for developing and implementing AI.
Amazon’s AWS, Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL) Cloud and Oracle’s (ORCL) Cloud Infrastructure have all committed to using the new chip starting next year.
Winning orders is easy with the outsized brand recognition and type of game changing product on offer.
The current version of the Nvidia processor is already experiencing accelerated demand.
But the product is facing stiffer competition: Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is bringing its rival MI300 chip to market in the fourth quarter, and Intel Corp. claims that its Gaudi 2 model is faster than the H100.
AMD is another chip company that readers should feel comfortable diversifying into if they don’t feel comfortable putting all eggs into the Nvidia basket.
AMD’s stock is surging towards old highs around $125 and should overtake that soon after the nice rally in the 2nd half of the year.
With the new product, Nvidia is trying to keep up with the size of data sets used to create AI models and services.
Adding the enhanced memory capability will make the H200 much faster at bombarding software synthesizing data.
Large computer makers and cloud service providers are expected to start using the H200 in the second quarter of 2024.
Nvidia got its start making graphics cards for gamers, but its powerful processors have now won a following among data center operators.
That division has gone from being a side business to the company’s biggest moneymaker in less than five years.
Nvidia’s graphics chips helped pioneer an approach called parallel computing, where a massive number of relatively simple calculations are handled at the same time.
That’s allowed it win major orders from data center companies, at the expense of traditional processors supplied by Intel.
The growth helped turn Nvidia into the poster child for AI computing earlier this year — and sent its market valuation soaring.
Nvidia is like a freight train that has left the station.
The stock is up 9 straight days as we cruise into its earnings report on November 21st.
It’s hard to see this earnings report being nothing short of spectacular and Nvidia have become famous for forecasting the unthinkable.
They then go and surpass a high bar and push the envelope further so it’s not a bad idea to buy NVDA before the earnings report.
The speed at which they come out with products is astounding and now being able to boast the best server chip in the tech enterprise community, it just represents yet another powerful part of their stunning array of tech arsenal.
$600 per share is a no-brainer for Nvidia and that will be surpassed in 2024.
