Global Market Comments
May 17, 2019
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(APRIL 15 BIWEEKLY STRATEGY WEBINAR Q&A),
(MSFT), (GOOGL), (AAPL), (LMT), (XLV), (EWG), (VIX), (VXX), (BA), (TSLA), (UBER), (LYFT), (ADBE),
(HOW TO HANDLE THE FRIDAY, MAY 17 OPTIONS EXPIRATION), (INTU),
Below please find subscribers’ Q&A for the Mad Hedge Fund Trader May 15 Global Strategy Webinar with my guest and co-host Bill Davis of the Mad Day Trader. Keep those questions coming!
Q: Where are we with Microsoft (MSFT)?
A: I think Microsoft is really trying to bottom here. It’s only giving up $8 from its recent high, that's why I went long yesterday, and you can be hyper-conservative and only do the June $110-$115 vertical bull call spread like I did. That will bring in a 13.68% profit in 28 trading days, which these days is pretty good. This morning would have been a great entry point for that spread if you couldn’t get it yesterday.
Q: How will tariffs affect Apple (AAPL) when they hit?
A: The price of your iPhone goes up $140—that calculation has already been done. All of Apple's iPhones are made in China, something like 220 million a year. There’s no way that can be moved, they need a million people for the production of these phones. It took them 20 years to build that facility and production capacity; it would take them 20 years to move it and it couldn't be done anywhere else in the world. So, that's why Apple led the charge on the downside and that's why it will lead the charge to the upside on any trade war resolution.
Q: How bad is the trade war going to get?
A: The market is betting now by only going down 1,400 Dow points it will be resolved on June 28th in Osaka. If that doesn’t happen it could get a lot worse. It could get down to my down 2,250-point target, and if it continues much beyond that, then we’ll get the whole full 4,500 points and be back at December lows. After that, you’re really looking at a global recession, a global depression, and ultimately nearing 18,000 in Dow, the 2016 low.
Q: Will global trade wars force US Treasuries down to around 2.10% on the ten year?
A: Yes. Again, the question is how bad will it get? If we resolve the trade war in six weeks, treasuries will probably double bottom here at around a 2.33% yield. If we go beyond that, then 2.10% is a chip shot and we go into a real live recession. The truth is no one knows anything, and we really don’t have any influence over what happens.
Q: How will equities digest and increase in European tariffs for cars?
A: It would completely demolish the European economy—especially that of Germany (EWG) which has 50% of its economy dependent on exports (primarily cars) and mostly to the U.S. And if we wipe out our biggest customer, Europe, then that would spill over here very quickly. Anybody who sells to Europe—like all the big Tech companies—would get slaughtered in that situation.
Q: Is it time to buy the Volatility Index (VIX)?
A: It’s too late to buy (VIX) now. I don’t want to touch it until we get down to that $12-$13 handle again because the time decay on this is enormous. Time decay is more than 50% a year, so your timing has to be perfect with trading any (VIX) products, whether it’s the (VXX), the (VIX) futures, the (VIX) options, or so on. There are countless people shorting (VIX) here, and they will short it all the way down to $12 again.
Q: What should I do about Boeing at this point?
A: We went long, got out, took our profit and caught this rally up to $400 a share. Then (BA) gave it up and it broke down. It’s a really tempting long here. Along with Apple, Boeing has the largest value of exports to China of any company. They have orders for hundreds of airlines from China, so they are an easy target, especially if there is a ramp up in the intensity of the trade war. That said, something like a June $270-$300 vertical bull call spread is very tempting, especially with elevated volatility up here, so I’m watching that very closely. We’re looking for the recertification of the 737 MAX bounce which could happen in the next few weeks; if that does happen it should rally at least back up to 380.
Q: Are your moving averages simple or exponential?
A: I just use the simple. I find that the simpler a concept is, the more people can understand it, and the more people buy it; that’s why I always try to keep everything simple and leave the algorithms for the computers.
Q: What stocks are insulated from a US/China trade war?
A: None. When the whole market goes risk off, people sell everything. Remember that an overwhelming portion of the market is now indexed with passive investment funds, so they just go straight risk on/risk off. It makes no difference what the fundamentals are, it makes no difference who has a lot of Chinese business or a little—everyone gets hit and everyone will get boosted when the trade war ends. There is no place to hide except cash, which is why I went 100% cash going into this. People seem to forget that cash has option value and having a lot of cash going into one of these situations is actually worth a lot of money in terms of opportunities.
Q: Do you have any thoughts on Uber’s (UBER) bad performance?
A: Yes, the whole sector was wildly overvalued, but no one knew that until they brought it to market and found out the real supply and demand for the issue. The smartest company of the year has to be Lyft (LYFT), which got a nice valuation by doing their issue first and keeping it small. So, they kind of rained on Uber’s parade; at one point, Uber was down 25% from their IPO price. That’s awful.
Q: Is Trump forcing the Fed to drop rates with all this tariff threat?
A: Yes, and if you remember, Trump really ramped up the attacks on the Fed in December. And my bet is at the first sign the trade talks were in trouble, they wanted to lower rates to offset the hit to the U.S. economy. There was no economic reason to suddenly demand huge interest rate cuts last December other than a falling stock market. The tariffs amount to a $72 billion tax increase on the American consumer, felt mostly at the low end, and that is terrible for the economy in that it reduces purchasing power by exactly that much.
Q: Would you buy the dollar as a safe haven trade?
A: No, I would not. The dollar may actually go down some more, especially with the collapse in our interest rates and European interest rates bottoming at negative levels. The best thing in the world in a high-risk environment like this is cash—don’t try to get clever and buy something you think will outperform. You could be disappointed.
Q: Why is healthcare (XLV) behaving so badly?
A: You don’t want to get into political football ahead of an election. That said, they're already so cheap that any kind of recovery could very well take healthcare up big, especially on an individual company basis. This is a sector where individual stock selection is crucial.
Q: Would you buy deep in the money calls on PayPal (PYPL)?
A: Yes, I would. Wait for a down day. Today we’re up slightly, but if we have a weak afternoon and a weak opening tomorrow morning, that would be a good time to add more longs in technology. PayPal is absolutely at the top of the list, as are names like Adobe (ADBE) and Alphabet (GOOGL).
Q: Should I be buying LEAPS in this environment?
A: No; a LEAP is a one-year long term deep out-of-the-money call spread. That was a great December bottom trade. The people who bought leaps then made huge fortunes. We’re too high here to consider leaps for the main market unless it's for something that’s just been bombed out, like a Tesla (TSLA) or a Boeing (BA), where you had big drops—then I would look at LEAPS for the super decimated stocks. But the rest of the market is still too high for thinking about leaps. Wait a couple of months and we may get back to those December lows.
Q: What happened to your May 10th bear market call?
A: Actually, it’s kind of looking good. It’s looking in fact like the market topped on May 2nd. If saner heads prevail, the trade war will end (or at least we’ll get a fake agreement) and the market will go to a new high. If not, then that May 10th target forecast I made two years ago IS the final top.
Q: You’re saying today we’re at a bottom?
A: We’re at a bottom for a short-term trade with a June 21st target. That was the expiration date of the options spreads I did this week. Whether this is the final bottom in the whole down move for a longer term, no one has any idea, even if they try to say differently. This is totally dependent on political developments.
Q: What do you have to say about Lockheed Martin (LMT)?
A: This sector usually does well with a wartime background. Expect that to continue for the foreseeable future. But at a certain point, the defense stocks which have had fantastic runs under Trump will start to discount a democratic win in the next election. If that does happen, defense will get slaughtered. I would be using any future strength to sell out of the whole defense area. Peace could be fatal to this sector.
Mad Hedge Technology Letter
January 16, 2019
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(3D PRINTING GETS A SECOND WIND),
(SSYS), (ETSY), (MSFT), (BA), (NFLX), (GE), (LMT)
Global Market Comments
November 7, 2018
Fiat Lux
SPECIAL ELECTION ISSUE
Featured Trade:
(THROWING RED MEAT TO MY BASE)
(RTN), (LMT), (NOC), (HON), (XOM), (CVX), (DVN)
It turned out to be a category two blue wave, not the Category four or five one Democrats had hoped for.
The Democrats picked up 28 seats in the House of Representatives but lost two in the Senate.
The one-liner here is that the most generous corporate tax cuts in US history are frozen in place for two more years. That is good for the economy and good for stocks.
You have to laugh at some of the stories that started filing in on Tuesday. In Brooklyn, NY election, officials called the fire department to break down the door of the polling place because they had the wrong keys. Polls everywhere ran out of ballots, while others suffered voting machine breakdowns.
Not so here in Nevada where everything ran flawlessly. My smiling face was safely stored in the Washoe County voter database and a backup paper ballot was created for good measure. No Russians here! Nevada now has two Democratic Senators for the first time in history.
Fortunately, I am old enough to have taken a civics class in high school which has not been taught in public schools for decades. A year working in the White House Press Corps (during the Reagan era) gives me additional perspective.
It shows. According to a recent survey, only 27% of Americans can identify all three branches of the federal government (executive, legislative, and the judicial).
The responsibility, therefore, falls to me to explain the outcome of yesterday’s midterm election and the trading and investment implications therein.
With the Democrats winning the House of Representatives and the Republicans controlling the Senate, we are about to enter the golden age of gridlock.
It is now impossible for any new law to be passed at the federal level. The only way it could is if they agreed on something, but so far, the two parties have shown little propensity to do so. They might as well be chalk and cheese.
Even if they did jointly pass a bill, it could still be vetoed by president Trump. Can you really see Donald Trump signing a bill sponsored by Nancy Pelosi? Given his preference for disruption, I would say there is a little chance of that happening.
The Democrats now have a crucial power and that is complete control of the purse strings. If Trump wants to spend anything at all, it can only be with Democratic approval.
It is highly unlikely that the Democrats will not approve ANY expansion of the debt ceiling, given the enormous increases in government spending Trump has inspired.
You can certainly expect the growth of defense spending to slow, if not stop completely, so avoid these stocks like the plague, like Raytheon (RTN), Lockheed Martin (LMT), Northrop Grumman (NOC), and Honeywell (HON).
This perfectly sets up a number of government shutdowns in the coming two years. Each one of these will bring a 10% stock market correction, but probably not much more. This was the case when Republicans shut down the government under President Obama sometime for weeks.
Control of the Senate isn’t really all that important. Once one branch of government is gone, the legislative calendar grinds to a halt. It does retain for the president the right to appoint judges. But that really involves social issues, not market ones, and will have no market impact. I can’t think of any big business issues coming up before the Supreme Court.
You can count on the House to resurrect the investigation of Russian influence in the 2016 election which was put to sleep with no findings by the Republicans nearly a year ago. On the first day in office, the new Democratic majority will subpoena Donald Trump’s tax returns. Long in hiding like the Loch Ness monster and bigfoot, they will finally see the light of day.
An impeachment motion against Trump will almost certainly pass the House but it won’t be anything more than a symbolic gesture. Without a two-thirds vote in the Senate, it will go nowhere. I doubt it will even come up for a vote.
The House can also use the Congressional Review Act to roll back any Trump administration rule it doesn’t like, which is pretty much all of them. Just last week, Trump said he could overturn a constitutional amendment with an executive order.
Expect the courts to get clogged with litigation on everything. Oil companies will be the big victims here. Avoid Exxon (XOM), Chevron (CVX), and Devon Energy (DVN). Their free pass on environmental regulation is about to end.
And while the tax cuts have been frozen on place, so is the steep upward trajectory of the growth of government debt. Borrowing is expected to top $1.4 trillion next year, levels not seen since the Great Recession. That means the Golden Age of short selling in the bond market, now 2 ½-year-old, has many more years to run. Keep selling the United States Treasury Bond Fund (TLT) on rallies and buy the (TBT) on dips.
The figures belie the massive leftwing swing that has taken place in the nation. West Virginia went for Trump by 43 points in 2016 but just reelected a Democratic Senator, Joe Manchin. In Colorado, they elected the first openly gay governor. The Republicans only won the Senate in Arizona because the Green Party split the vote, taking 2.2%.
Where Republicans did win, it was only by razor-thin margins, seeing 2016 leads disappear from double digits to tenths of a percent across the country, as we saw in Florida and Texas. That sets up and interesting 2020 where demographic change alone should be enough to tip the balance leftward. Oh, and we will be in recession by then too.
Fortunately, you will be rewarded for your long suffering during the campaign which saw an unwelcome 46% increase in negative advertising. Markets have delivered an average 8.5% return in every fourth quarter since 1980 and are up 89% of the time. Since WWII, every midterm election has generated an eye-popping 14.5% average return in the following 12 months.
And now for the bad news: the 2020 presidential campaign starts tomorrow, and we won’t know who the Democratic candidate is until TWO MONTHS BEFORE THE ELECTION!
Global Market Comments
October 11, 2018
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(REACHING PEAK TECHNOLOGY STOCKS),
(GOOGL), (MSFT), (NFLX), (FB), (AAPL),
(LOCKHEED MARTIN’S SECRET FUSION BREAKTHROUGH),
(LMT), (NOC), (BA)
One of the blowout performers in recent years has been defense company Lockheed Martin (LMT), whose stock has doubled since 2014.
Even if we don’t get new wars, we still have several ongoing ones, the administration has promised substantially ramped up defense spending in coming years.
And thanks to a decade of downsizing and consolidation there are only a few serious players left in the sector.
That means a lot of money piling into a limited number of names.
However, there is one factor that is helping (LMT) that virtually no one outside the theoretical physics community knows about.
That would be ignition.
No, I don’t mean the rebuilt ignition you bought on eBay for the beat-up ’68 Cadillac El Dorado up on blocks in your front yard.
Lockheed Martin’s famed Skunk Works in the California high desert has finally come out of the closet and announced that it has made a major breakthrough in fusion research.
A small functioning reactor could be available in as little as three years.
If true, the news would be dynamite.
I have long been partial to Lockheed as a company as it employed my mother on an assembly line in Los Angeles to build B-17 bombers during WWII.
When I visited a secret Russian airbase in 1992 to view the wreckage of Gary Powers’ U-2 spy plane, the steel Lockheed serial number was unmistakable.
After I asked to take it home as a souvenir, my hosts replied with a very firm “Nyet!” and hurried me out of the facility, citing it as a “National Treasure.”
The new fusion technology would deliver ten times more power than conventional nuclear reactors at a fraction of the cost.
Fusion involves the combining of two hydrogen atoms to create one helium atom releasing immense amounts of power.
To know how much, simply refer to Albert Einstein’s famous equation, E = MC squared.
If successful, the discovery could make available unlimited amounts of carbon-free energy at near zero cost without creating any toxic waste.
The breakthrough relies on using a “magnetic bottle” to contain the several hundred million degrees of heat generated instead of four foot thick reinforced concrete containment structures.
So far, the stock market is clueless.
Economical fusion power, the type unleashed by thermonuclear hydrogen bombs, has long been the dream of physicists and long-term planners everywhere.
The focus of research has until now taken place at the National Ignition Facility next door to me at Lawrence Livermore National Labs in Livermore, California. There, progress has recently suffered several setbacks, cost overruns, and time delays.
Mention California to most people, and images of love beads, tie-dyed T-shirts, and Birkenstocks come to mind.
But it is also the home of the first atomic bomb which was originally designed amid the vineyards and cow pastures of this bucolic suburb.
Dr. Robert Oppenheimer of the UC Berkeley School of Mining used to keep the first ever purified piece of plutonium in a file cabinet in his office that, thankfully, was made out of steel.
If it were a wooden cabinet, the US might have lost WWII.
Today, the world’s first cyclotron has been turned into a modern steel sculpture in a traffic roundabout, not a mile from my home.
The thinking at the time was that if someone accidentally flipped the wrong switch, it wouldn’t blow up San Francisco, or more importantly, Berkeley.
The $5 billion Livermore project aims 192 lasers at a BB-sized piece of frozen hydrogen, using fusion to convert it to helium and unlimited amounts of clean energy.
The heat released by this process reaches 100 million degrees, hotter than the core of the sun, and will be used to fuel conventional steam electric power plants.
The raw material is seawater and a byproduct is liquid hydrogen which can be used to fuel cars, trucks, and aircraft. If this all sounds like it is out of Star Trek, you’d be right.
I worked with these guys in the early 70s back when math was used to make things and before it was used to game financial markets, and I can tell you there is not a smarter and more dedicated bunch of people on the planet.
If it works, we will get unlimited amounts of clean energy for low cost in about 20 years. Oil will only be used to make plastics and fertilizer, taking the price down to $10 for domestic production only.
The crude left in the Middle East will become worthless. Lumps of coal will only be found in museums, or in jewelry, its original use. If it doesn’t work, it will melt the adjacent Mt. Diablo and take me with it.
If Lockheed’s fusion success is scalable, it could send the share price on a ballistic move from current levels.
It could well also drag the rest of the defense sector with it.
That would include Northrop Grumman (NOC) and Boeing Aircraft (BA).
If you don’t get your newsletter tomorrow, you’ll know what happened.
Now, what is this switch for?
Global Market Comments
October 5, 2018
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 17 HOUSTON STRATEGY LUNCHEON INVITATION),
(OCTOBER 3 BIWEEKLY STRATEGY WEBINAR Q&A)
(SPY), (VIX), (VXX), (MU), (LRCX), (NVDA), (AAPL), (GOOG), (XLV), (USO), (TLT), (AMD), (LMT), (ACB), (TLRY), (WEED)
Below please find subscribers’ Q&A for the Mad Hedge Fund Trader October 3 Global Strategy Webinar with my guest and co-host Bill Davis of the Mad Day Trader.
As usual, every asset class long and short was covered. You are certainly an inquisitive lot, and keep those questions coming!
Q: Will the market keep increasing for the rest of the year?
A: We haven’t had the pullback yet, so the short answer is yes. My yearend target of and S&P 500 (SPY) for the end of 2018 still stands. You can’t argue with the immediate price action. That said, the market is wildly overbought for the medium term and is approaching valuation levels we haven’t seen since the Dotcom peak in 2000. That why I am running a 70% cash trading book now.
Q: Should I be buying the Volatility Index (VIX) here?
A: Look at the bottom where we broke back in August, if we go down there and sit for a couple of days, then go out and buy the March 2019 $40 iPath S&P 500 VIX Short-Term Futures ETN (VXX) calls—way out of the money, way far in the future—and that way if you get any bounce in the (VIX) in the next 6 months, you’ll make a ton of money on that. You can buy them today for 50 cents. Plus, we could get one of these situations where there’s a major selloff once we’re into the new year, so a 6-month (VXX) call option would hedge that.
Q: Given the choice of Apple (AAPL) or Google (GOOG), which would you buy?
A: If you’re a conservative, old lady, widow and orphan type, you’d probably want to buy Apple— it’s almost turned into a utility, it’s so reliably safe, going up and has a nice dividend. If you want to be aggressive, swinging for the fences young stud and are looking for a double, I would go with Google—much higher growth pattern, pays no dividend and has had a 3-month consolidation going sideways. The only thing that could hurt this company would be government regulation, but with the Democrats possibly taking control of Congress in November, the prospect of government regulation of the entire technology sector could rapidly fade away.
Q: When should I get into Health Care (XLV)?
A: I think you have to wait at this point. To me, it’s tremendously overbought at the moment, but is still enjoying a long-term bull move. This is one of my two favorite sectors in the entire market. It has been rising for four months now, even though the Trump threat of price cuts are constantly overhanging the market.
Q: Is oil (USO) going to 100?
A: Because of the disruptions caused by the Iran sanctions and the tearing up of the Iran Nuclear Treaty, Trump has created a short squeeze in oil prices. He is threatening to boycott any country that buys oil from Iran, so Iran is shipping their oil through China, which is already under sanctions itself. However, that is easier said than done. The oil business is much more complicated than people realize. For China to take Iranian oil, they literally have to build new refineries from scratch to process the crude from Iran; no two crudes are alike. When you build a major supply, you have to build refineries to match that, and you have to get it there. This market will eventually stabilize, but in the meantime, there is a big short squeeze going on in Europe.
Q: Do you see the economy going strong into the end of the year?
A: Yes, I do—we still have the tax cuts, global liquidity, and deregulation kicking in, and those things will all work until the end of the year. I think we close at the highs of the year, and after that we’re going to have to start to work hard for our money once again in 2019. The US economy is like a supertanker; it takes a long time to turn it around.
Q: Will the interest rate spike kill the market?
You think? Investors are so used to ultra-low interest rates that a transition to normal rates will be traumatic. Next Friday, we get Core CPI, and if that comes in hot we could see another spike to 3.35% in the ten-year US Treasury bond (TLT). There are now a ton of people desperate to get out of their bond holdings at last week’s prices. This is why I have been selling short the bond market for the past three years and selling as recently as Monday. The next leg down in a 30-year bear market has begun.
Q: Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has shot over $30—would you sell it?
A: We love the company long term but short term it is just way overdone; take the double and run, and then buy back on the next dip.
Q: Are you still bearish on the chip company?
A: Short term yes, long term no. This sector is now totally driven by the trade war with China. This includes NVIDIA (NVDA), Micron Technology (MU) and LAM Research (LRCX). Lam is particularly exposed because they had ordered to sell ten entire chip factories to China which is now on hold. That said, the day the trade way ends these stocks will all start a 50% run up. If China gets the same free pass and symbolic treaty that Canada did, that could happen sooner than later. If you can’t sleep at night until then, cut your position in half. If you still can’t sleep, cut it again.
Q: Do you think Lockheed Martin (LMT) is a buy Here at $350?
A: No, there is a double top risk for the stock right here. And if the Democrats get control of congress, the whole Trump trade could unwind. That would give the opposition the purse strings and the first thing they’ll do is cut defense spending, which Trump bumped up by $50 billion.
Q: Do you have any views on pot stocks like Aurora Cannabis (ACB), Tilray (TLRY) and (WEED)?
Stay away in droves. They’re this year’s bitcoin stocks. It’s still illegal. That’s why these companies are all based in Canada. And after all it’s a weed. How hard is it to grow? The barriers to entry are zero.
Global Market Comments
June 13, 2018
Fiat Lux
SPECIAL SPACE X ISSUE
Featured Trade:
(LAST CHANCE TO ATTEND THE FRIDAY, JUNE 15, 2018, DENVER, CO,
GLOBAL STRATEGY LUNCHEON),
(WILL SPACE X BE YOUR NEXT TEN BAGGER?),
(EBAY), (TSLA), (SCTY), (BA), (LMT)
