Global Market Comments
February 3, 2025
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(MARKET OUTLOOK FOR THE WEEK AHEAD or THE TRADE WAR BEGINS)
(SPY), ($COMPQ), (TSLA), (VST), (MSFT), (ADBE), (DELL), (NVDA)
Tag Archive for: (SPY)
As I write this, tariffs are coming into force and confusion reigns supreme at the borders. The worst-case scenario has arrived.
In the Marine Corp., they say that a missing 50-cent part can ground a $50 million dollar airplane. It turns out that many of the 50-cent parts are made in Canada and Mexico, which are now in trucks stuck in massive traffic jams at the border. The border is in no way set up for any change in the tariff regime.
Think of it as a mini Covid shock to the supply chain. The parts will eventually show up but will be more expensive.
This is not what traders wanted to hear. That great whooshing sound was the stock market giving up hard-fought gains for the day. Nervousness is running rampant.
With mass firing on the way throughout the government, it’s just a matter of time before the passport renewal process extends from weeks to years. I am telling friends and family to renew now before the process clogs up and shuts down. At the very least, fees are about to go up a lot, now at $130.
When I opened up my laptop on Sunday night and saw the NASDAQ ($COMPQ) down 900 points, I thought that a new war had broken out somewhere or another 9/11 event had taken place. That recovered to down only 400 by the New York opening. This is exactly the set up I had been waiting for since mid-December. I started piling in on longs in big tech stocks, turning my January performance from lackluster to robust in a matter of days.
And that’s the way it’s going to be in 2025. Maintain iron discipline and hold out for these rare sweet spots, then pile in. Never chase, that was last year’s game. We could be range trading for quite some time. Index players might be lucky to make anything by year-end, and might be better off parking their money in 90-Treasury bills, now yielding 4.2%.
By the end of the week, most of the losses were recovered, except for the big AI providers like (NVDA) and (AMD), which have had their own problems for the last seven months. The net is that it is potentially bad news for AI providers and great news for AI users, which is almost everybody.
I have heard from several clients that they spent the week trying to trip up the DeepSeek program and have come up with hilariously inaccurate answers. For example, DeepSeek didn’t know that my former USC classmate OJ Simpson died last year and thought he was a current NFL football player. And don’t ask who Winston was in 1984. Other examples about.
In the meantime, the big tech companies are all tinkering with DeepSeek, making changes and improvements. It is definitely a clever programming improvement, but it’s not going to destroy the world.
Whatever happened to Cold Fusion?
Remember that 1990’s meme that set stocks on fire? It was supposed to give us free electricity forever. Except that here I am 35 years later, and cold fusion is still 20-40 years into the future. It’s always 40 years in the future. The same thing happened with the 3D printing craze and the fax mania before that.
That’s what came to mind last December when I first heard that the Chinese app DeepSeek had delivered a revolutionary new AI program that was supposed to cut the need for high-end chips by 99%. I ignored it just like all of the other Chinese apps that come out on a daily basis.
Which leads me to the quandary of the day. Why the heck is Europe suddenly doing so well? The German stock market has outperformed the S&P 500 (SPY) by a large margin in recent months. Whenever I mention putting a dollar into any European country, my continental friends say I’m out of my mind and that they only want more American investment ideas. Is there something going on here?
My only thought is that the markets may be discounting an end to the Ukraine War this year. If so, some 10 million barrels a day of oil would be unleashed on the market, taking prices down to $30 a barrel. Ukraine would reclaim its position as the world’s largest agriculture exporter, collapsing prices for wheat and sunflower oil. And Europe will be able to pare back its recently increased defense spending.
You heard it here first.
By the way, the 9/11 reference brings to mind one of the most notorious short sales of all time. The day before the attack, a Swiss bank acting on behalf of an anonymous client bought several thousand short-dated put options on American Airlines (AA). After two American planes were deliberately crashed in a suicide attack, the trade made $200 million. The FBI set a trap to arrest those who came to collect. But they never showed. Eventually, the trades were unwound by the exchange. It’s all true.
We managed to attain a respectable +5.80% return in January. That is close to my average monthly return for all of 2024. The magic is still there.
That takes us to a year-to-date profit of +5.80% so far in 2025. My trailing one-year return stands at +85.34% as a bad trade a year ago fell off the one-year record. That takes my average annualized return to +49.96% and my performance since inception to +757.69%.
I used the Monday meltdown to start filing in positions in Nvidia (NVDA) and Vistra (VST). That is on top of my existing short strangle in Tesla (TSLA). The Mad Hedge Technology added a slew of long on Microsoft (MSFT), Adobe (ADBE), Dell (DELL), and (NVDA).
Some 63 of my 70 round trips, or 90%, were profitable in 2023. Some 74 of 94 trades have been profitable in 2024, and several of those losses were really break-even. That is a success rate of +78.72%.
Try beating that anywhere.
Technology Stocks Destroyed on News of China’s DeepSeek, an AI program that takes them a great leap forward. U.S. technology firms like Nvidia plunged, as Chinese startup DeepSeek sparked concerns over competitiveness in AI and America’s lead in the sector, triggering a global sell-off. DeepSeek launched a free, open-source large language model in late December, claiming it was developed in just two months at a cost of under $6 million. These developments have bolstered questions about the large amounts of money big tech companies have been investing in artificial intelligence models and data centers.
US Home Sales Hit 30-Year Low in 2024, the second year in a row of weak sales. High costs related to homeownership sapped sales again. The average rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage has hovered between 6% and 8% since late 2022. Avoid interest rate plays.
Nvidia Drops $600 Billion in Market Capitalization, the largest in stock market history. CEO Jensen Huang’s net worth dropped below $100 billion, while CEOs of the Mangiest Seven plunged by $67 Billion. I told you it was coming. Buy when the washout finishes. The bubble didn’t burst.
The Cruise Business is Rocketing, with Royal Caribbean (RCL) just running up its best five-week sales period in history. There is a two-year wait to order the enormous new ships, the biggest, 264,000-tonne Icon of the Seas, carries a mind-blowing 7,400 passengers. Buy (RCL) and (CCL)on dips.
US Consumer Confidence Dives amid renewed concerns about the labor market and inflation. The Conference Board said on Tuesday its consumer confidence index fell to 104.1 this month from an upwardly revised 109.5 in December. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast the index rising to 105.6 from the previously reported 104.7.
Fed Leaves Interest Rates Unchanged at 4.25%, tanking stocks. All interest rate plays will remain dead in the water. Will the pause be for six months or a year, or will the next Fed be a rate rise? Jay Powell is waiting for the impact of new government policies like all the rest of us. Buy financials on dips. The Fed's balance sheet continues to shrink and is down to $6.8 trillion, withdrawing liquidity from the system. All references to “progress” on inflation were dropped.
Coffee Prices Hit a New All-Time High at $3.60/pound for Arabica. Brazil, by far the world's largest producer, has few beans left to sell, and worries over its upcoming harvest persist. Dealers said 70%-80% of Brazil's current arabica harvest has been sold and new trades are slow. Brazil produces nearly half the world's arabica beans, a high-end variety typically used in roast and ground blends. This is yet another climate change play.
Waymo Self-Driving Taxis Expanding to Ten New Cities. After testing the Waymo Driver in multiple cities, the company says the technology is adapting successfully to new environments, leading to the expansion. In addition to ongoing trips to Truckee, Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Upstate New York, and Tokyo, the expansion includes testing in San Diego and Las Vegas, with more cities yet to be announced.
Tesla Bombs in 2024, with earnings at $25.5 billion last year versus $27.2 billion, or down 5.5%. Even a presidential friendship can’t boost earnings. Despite missing on every metric, the shares were only down $3 today. Tesla is more about belief in the future and today’s facts. But full self-driving will launch in the US in June after being stalled by the previous administration. No guidance for sales in 2025. Energy storage was the big grower last year and will do well this year. Not the rose bed I was promised. My short position is looking good, but I’m maintaining my long-term target of $1,000.
US GDP Finishes 2024 at 2.3%, less than expected but still the strongest in the world. Household spending grew at a 4.2% pace, most since early 2023. Equipment spending fell at a 7.8% rate on the Boeing strike impact. What happens next is anyone’s guess.
Microsoft Blows Up on Cloud Guidance, on huge earnings disappointment, taking the stock down 6%. The company beat estimates on the top and bottom lines but fell short on estimates for its Intelligent Cloud business. Microsoft’s Commercial Cloud segment revenue, which includes cloud services sales, saw revenue of $40 billion, a 21% year-over-year increase but shy of Wall Street expectations of $41.1 billion. Microsoft's intelligent cloud business, which includes its Azure platform, saw revenue of $25.5 billion. Wall Street was expecting $25.8 billion. I’m buying the dip.
Weekly Jobless Claims Fall 16,000 to a seasonally adjusted 207,000 for the week ended Jan. 25, the Labor Department said on Thursday. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast 220,000 claims for the latest week.
Consumer Inflation Expectations Comes in Soft. The personal consumption expenditures price index increased 2.6% on a year-over-year basis in December, while core PCE was at 2.8%, both in line with expectations but well ahead of the Fed’s 2% target. Personal income climbed 0.4% as forecast, while spending rose 0.7%. Markets liked the number.
Apple is Catching a Bid on the assumption that diplomat Tim Cook can somehow avoid import duties from China. Even at a 100% tariff, it would probably add only $100 to the cost of an iPhone, which is made in China.
My Ten-Year View – A Reassessment
When have to substantially downsize our expectations of equity returns in view of the election outcome. My new American Golden Age, or the next Roaring Twenties is now looking at a headwind. The economy will completely stop decarbonizing. Technology innovation will slow. Trade wars will exact a high price. Inflation will return. The Dow Average will rise by 600% to 240,000 or more in the coming decade. The new America will be far more efficient and profitable than the old.
My Dow 240,000 target has been pushed back to 2035.
On Monday, February 3 at 8:30 AM EST, the ISM Manufacturing Index PMI is out.
On Tuesday, February 4 at 8:30 AM, the JOLTS Job Openings is released.
On Wednesday, February 5 at 8:30 AM, the ISM Survives PMI is printed.
On Thursday, February 6 at 8:30 AM, the Weekly Jobless Claims are disclosed.
On Friday, February 7 at 8:30 AM, Nonfarm Payroll Report for January is announced. At 2:00 PM the Baker Hughes Rig Count is printed.
As for me, the University of Southern California has a student jobs board that is positively legendary. It is where the actor John Wayne picked up a gig working as a stagehand for John Ford which eventually made him a movie star.
As a beneficiary of a federal work/study program in 1970, I was entitled to pick any job I wanted for the princely sum of $1.00 an hour, then the minimum wage. I noticed that the Biology Department was looking for a lab assistant to identify and sort Arctic plankton.
I thought, “What the heck is Arctic plankton?” I decided to apply to find out.
I was hired by a Japanese woman professor whose name I long ago forgot. She had figured out that Russians were far ahead of the US in Arctic plankton research, thus creating a “plankton gap.” “Gaps” were a big deal during the Cold War, so that made her a layup to obtain a generous grant from the Defense Department to close the “plankton gap.”
It turns out that I was the only one who applied for the job, as postwar anti-Japanese sentiment then was still high on the West Coast. I was given my own lab bench and a microscope and told to get to work.
It turns out that there is a vast ecosystem of plankton under 20 feet of ice in the Arctic consisting of thousands of animal and plant varieties. The whole system is powered by sunlight that filters through the ice. The thinner the ice, such as at the edge of the Arctic ice sheet, the more plankton. In no time, I became adept at identifying copepods, euphasia, and calanus hyperboreaus, which all feed on diatoms.
We discovered that there was enough plankton in the Arctic to feed the entire human race if a food shortage ever arose, then a major concern. There was plenty of plant material and protein there. Just add a little flavoring and you have an endless food supply.
The high point of the job came when my professor traveled to the North Pole, the first woman ever to do so. She was a guest of the US Navy, which was overseeing the collection hole in the ice. We were thinking the hole might be a foot wide. When she got there, she discovered it was in fact 50 feet wide. I thought this might be to keep it from freezing over, but thought nothing of it.
My freshman year passed. The following year, the USC jobs board delivered up a far more interesting job, picking up dead bodies for the Los Angeles Counter Coroner, Thomas Noguchi, the “Coroner to the Stars.” This was not long after Charles Manson was locked up, and his bodies were everywhere. The pay was better too, and I got to know the LA freeway system like the back of my hand.
It wasn’t until years later, when I had obtained a high security clearance from the Defense Department that I learned of the true military interest in plankton by both the US and the Soviet Union.
It turns out that the hole was not really for collecting plankton. Plankton was just the cover. It was there so a US submarine could surface, fire nuclear missiles at the Soviet Union, and then submarine again under the protection of the ice.
So, not only have you been reading the work of a stock market wizard these many years, you have also been in touch with one of the world’s leading experts on Artic plankton.
Live and learn.
1981 on Peleliu Island in the South Pacific
Stay Healthy,
John Thomas
CEO & Publisher
The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader
Global Market Comments
January 31, 2025
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(JANUARY 29 BIWEEKLY STRATEGY WEBINAR Q&A),
(META), (AMZN), (NVDA), (AMD) (GS), (SPY), (TSLA), (SBUX), (CCJ), (ADBE), (LMT), (GD), (RTX), (NVDA)
Below please find subscribers’ Q&A for the January 29 Mad Hedge Fund Trader Global Strategy Webinar, broadcast from Salt Lake City, UT.
Q: Are AI stocks going to crash?
A: Some already have, and others haven’t. It’s really about single-stock-picking the chip area and the pure AI plays, which have been enormously overextended. If you boil it down to a single sentence, if you offer AI for free, AI users like (META) and (AMZN) do really well, while AI producers, like (NVDA) and (AMD) get crushed. I’ve been warning for months that these things were getting too high. The end result is that in two weeks the price earnings multiple for Nvidia has gone from 40 to 25. You know, at 25, it really is quite attractive. It'll be even more attractive at 20 or even 15 if we get that low. I'll show you where we hit that on the charts. Don't forget their earnings are still growing at tremendous rates—we'll talk about that in a second.
Q: What stocks are good to invest in now?
A: Watch the banks. Watch the financials. They’ve hardly sold off. I was begging for Goldman Sachs (GS) to tank. It didn't—we only got a $10 drop. It's just not letting people in, which means higher highs for all the banks and financials are coming. That has become the no-brainer one-way trade of 2025. You know, I had an enormous number of bank LEAPS expire in my personal account on the January 17 option expiration. I'm waiting to get back in now. So that is the play.
Q: What's happening with Starbucks (SBUX)? Are they investable?
A: Starbucks was a disaster area until the summer when they brought in new management, which has a fantastic track record. The stock has since gone up 30%. You're kind of late to get in on this one. I don't really follow the stock anyway. Selling cups of coffee is not a high-margin business. I'd rather stick with the Tesla’s (TSLA) and Nvidia’s (NVDA) of the world where the value added is very high
Q: What will happen with Bitcoin in the new administration?
A: It's the same with everything. Higher highs first, lower lows later. If you're a Bitcoin investor now at 100,000, the big question is what happens when Donald Trump leaves office in four years? Does it go back to 5,000? We really don't know so, why touch Bitcoin when you can get 10 to 1 returns on all these other great companies which make stuff that you can actually touch and feel? Plus, you can leverage up with the LEAPS, and no one's going to steal your account, which happens frequently with Bitcoin holdings.
Q: Do you think tariffs are a good idea for the economy?
A: No, tariffs shrink global trade, they shrink globalization. It's a race to see if we can make other countries more poor than they can make us. It's an economy-shrinking strategy. It was a major contributor to causing the Great Depression in the 1930’s. That's why we abandoned tariffs 80 years ago with the end of World War II. I mean, the last cause of the 1930’s tariffs was World War II. That was a major contributing factor. So do I like tariffs? No. It turns out it's a great defensive strategy. If someone's making a fortune off you, they tend not to blow you up. So I think that's a big mistake and I will be an anti-tariff person to my grave. There are special situations like Chinese EVs, for example, where they're using a huge cost advantage to flood the emerging markets with cheap EVs. If that happened to the US, it would crash the US economy. In that one case, I'm in favor of tariffs. By the way, their EVs are using technology they basically stole from Tesla.
Q: What are your thoughts on defense stocks? With so many wars occurring all over the world.
A: Don't touch defense stocks with a 10-foot poll if the government is in favor of cost-cutting, the largest cost after Social Security is defense. We had a defense budget of about $824 billion in 2024. We have a 2.8 million man military and that cutting there and running down our weapons stocks would mean that you don't want to buy Lockheed Martin (LMT), General Dynamics (GD), Raytheon (RTX), all the big suppliers of weapons to the Ukraine war, for example, which looks like it's going to get cut off completely. They cut off all humanitarian aid to Ukraine last week. And of course, I was personally involved in delivering some of that humanitarian aid to Ukraine in the recent past. Yeah, defense looks bad if people really get serious about cost-cutting.
Q: Do you see the Fed dropping interest rates later this year?
A: That is possible. I tend to think we don't go into recession this year. It's a next year or year after type of thing. But markets can discount recession in six months to a year in advance like they did in 2007 and 2008. I don't think we get any more interest rate cuts. We'll just have to see what policies the new government implements, and how inflationary they are. And if they are inflationary, interest rates are going up, not down. That is why everybody's sitting on their hands right now and doesn't know what to do. Uncertainty at an eight-year high. You know, the government often talks one game but does the opposite. So, there’s nothing to do but wait and see.
Q: Well, what happened to the US housing market in 2025?
A: Nothing, you know volumes are shrinking. The last two years were the lowest volume sales in housing market history since the numbers were collected, and higher interest rates for longer. It's just more bad news. You know, something like 40% of all of the sales now are all cash. Prices are still going up again on paper, but there's almost no trade happening at these higher prices. And of course, the Millennials have been almost completely shut out of the market—the largest generation in history by the way—because they don't have enough money. They can't earn enough money; especially when AI is wiping out all the entry-level jobs, as it has been doing for two years in Silicon Valley.
Q: Here's a good question. How much time do we need to spend researching a company before we make an investment there?
A: Well, not that much, really. You can spend an hour or two reading the annual report, browsing through the most recent financial statement, and doing some news searches and you'll have a better read than most individual investors are going to have on a single stock. Then you start to see trends on what makes a good company, what makes a bad company, and over time, you get a feel for a company—when to get in, when to get out. That's one way. Or you can listen to the Mad Hedge Fund Trader, who's been doing this for 55 years and watching the same stocks. You wonder why you always have the same stocks up here and it's because I've been following these guys for forever or more. So you really get a handle on when they're doing well and when they're doing awful.
Q: Should we sell Nvidia (NVDA) stock for now?
A: No, I was telling people to cut positions the next time it ran to $150, which it did a few weeks ago. Now we're probably entering buy territory more than sell territory. Nvidia will come back. I just don't know where the bottom is for now, and it depends on your own investing style. If you're a five-year investor, you can forget about all this volatility, if you're a day trader, yeah, you probably should sell Nvidia now because you could buy it back $10 cheaper.
Q: Do you expect a new high after the Fed meeting?
A: No, I don't. I think we're stuck in a range for the S&P 500 for the next six months. After that, we may get a move. Depending on what effect government policies have on the economy.
Q: What about an alert for Adobe (ADBE)?
A: I didn't put out the alert to buy Adobe. The Adobe alert is part of the Mad Hedge Technology Letter service, and if you want to get purely tech trade alerts, go to the Mad Hedge website, go to the store, and you can see the technology letter is offered for sale up there. Here is the link: https://hi290.infusionsoft.app/app/orderForms/techletter
Q: What is the right size of account for doing this kind of trading?
A: We literally have college students trading with $500 accounts. We have lots of individuals trading with $5,000 accounts—that way you can buy 10 $400 positions and still have some room. We only recommend you put 10% of your cash in any one trade. A lot of retired people will keep a large portion of their money in an index like the S&P 500 (SPY) and take 10% of their money and use it to do our trade alerts, which then adds an extra return to the index position. So, the answer is different for different people.
Q: Do I see a meaningful correction like 20% or 30% in the next six months?
A: No, I really don't, but that could be 2026 business. When we get a big correction, we get a recession. Again, it's dependent on government policies and we have no idea what those are right now. People can only guess. I'm not in the guessing business. I'm in the sure thing business.
Q: Can you explain how to complete the trade alerts you send out?
A: What all the professionals do is they put out a spread of orders. If I put out an order to buy something at $9.00, you put in a bid at $9.00, $9.10, $9.20, $9.30, and $9.40. By the close, some or all of those will get done. Often they all get done by the end of the day when the high-frequency traders have to dump their positions because they're not allowed to carry overnight positions. You make them good-until-canceled orders. So if you get a low opening the next morning, you'll get entirely filled at the $9.00 level, and this is what my clients in Australia do. They only do overnight good-until-cancelled orders since the market's open from 11:30 PM until 6:00 AM in the morning, Australia time. They tend to make more money than any of my other clients because they only enter overnight GTC orders. So, people trying to outsmart the market on an intraday basis generally don't do very well.
Q: Should I sell the Cameco Corporation (CCJ) stock I bought on the nuclear trade?
A: No, I think (CCJ) recovers. I was looking at it yesterday. Elimination of the electricity trade is complete nonsense. I think the nuclear thing is real. It'll come back. And in fact, I bought Vistra Energy (VST) yesterday, so use this extreme sell-off to get into the nuclear trade if you missed it the first time around.
To watch a replay of this webinar with all the charts, bells, whistles, and classic rock music, just log in to www.madhedgefundtrader.com, go to MY ACCOUNT, click on GLOBAL TRADING DISPATCH, TECHNOLOGY LETTER, or JACQUIE'S POST, then WEBINARS, and all the webinars from the last 12 years are there in all their glory.
Good Luck and Good Trading,
John Thomas
CEO & Publisher
The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader
Global Market Comments
January 27, 2025
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(MARKET OUTLOOK FOR THE WEEK AHEAD, or THE TRADE WAR BEGINS),
(SPY), (TLT), (TSLA), (NFLX)
Global Market Comments
January 16, 2025
Fiat Lux
Featured Trades:
(WHY TECHNICAL ANALYSIS IS A DISASTER)
(SPY), (QQQ), (IWM), (VIX)
(TESTIMONIAL)
At my Mad Hedge Miami Beach Luncheon, I heard an amazing piece of information from a guest.
Fidelity recently conducted a study to identify their best-performing clients.
They neatly fell into two groups: people who forgot they had an account at Fidelity and dead people.
It all underlines the futility of trading the markets without true professional guidance, something many aspire to but few actually accomplish.
Of the many thousands of online newsletters and trade mentoring services, I only know of three that actually make money for clients.
Those would be mine and two others, and I’m not talking about who the other two are.
It is an industry filled with professional marketers, charlatans, and conmen.
Let me point out a few harsh lessons learned from this most recent meltdown and the rip-your-face-off rally that followed.
The next five months are ones of historical seasonal market strength.
The big lesson learned this summer was the utter uselessness of technical analyses. Usually, these guys are right only 50% of the time. This year, they missed the boat entirely.
The biggest losers?
Algorithms, which used the decisive breakdown of the (SPY) in August to go heavily short.
If you did, you lost your shirt. The market just shed a couple more points, reversed, and then kept going, and going, and going.
This is why technical analysis is utterly useless as an investment strategy. How many hedge funds use a pure technical strategy and a stand-alone basis?
Absolutely none, as it doesn’t make any money.
At best, it is just one of 100 tools you need to trade the market effectively. The shorter the time frame, the more accurate it becomes.
On an intraday basis, technical analysis is actually quite useful.
Leave it for the kids.
This is why I advise portfolio managers and financial advisors to use technical analysis as a means of timing order executions, and nothing more.
Most professionals agree with me.
Technical analysis derives from humans’ preference for looking at pictures instead of engaging in abstract mental processes. A picture is worth 1,000 words, and probably a lot more.
This is why technical analysis appeals to so many young people entering the market for the first time.
Buy a book available for $5 on Amazon, and you can become a Master of the Universe.
Who can resist that?
The problem is that high-frequency traders also bought that same book from Amazon a long time ago and have designed algorithms to frustrate every move of the technical analyst.
Sorry to be the buzz kill, but that is my take on technical analysis.
I have a much better solution than forgetting you have a trading account, or dying.
Take Cunard’s round-the-world cruise.
I have been sailing with Cunard since the 1970s when the original Queen Elizabeth was still afloat.
I’ve lost count of how many Transatlantic voyages I have taken across the pond.
For a mere $16,669 you can spend 117 days circumnavigating the globe with Cunard from Southampton, England in their cheapest inside cabin (click here for the link.)
That includes all the food you can eat for four months.
On the way, you can visit such exotic destinations as Bora Bora, The Seychelles, Reunion, and Moorea.
Not a bad deal.
By the time you get home, you will probably earn enough in your investment account to pay for the entire trip.
Hope you enjoyed your cruise.
Correction? What Correction?
Global Market Comments
January 13, 2025
Fiat Lux
Featured Trades:
(MARKET OUTLOOK FOR THE WEEK AHEAD or WHAT’S NEXT),
(SPY), (TSLA), (TLT), (GS)
This is not the rose garden we were promised.
Down three of six trading days so far in 2025, with the S&P 500 off 2.2%. Worse yet, there is an almost perfect head and shoulders topsetting up on the charts portending lower lows. Lead names like Tesla (TSLA) have taken it on the nose, down 25%.
Tax-deferred selling has definitely been the dead weight hanging on the market since January 1. High-net-worth individuals would have shot the financial advisors off if they had saddled them with big tax bills during the last weeks of 2024. After two 20% back-to-back years, many of these positions had doubles and triples in them. How long it will be anyone’s guess.
Once the selling does end, the market will go into “show me” mode, waiting for the new administration to deliver the promised action. This could be a long wait. The earliest Congress can vote on a new economy-changing bill in May. Until then, the market could be entering a tedious trading range until action is delivered.
The good news? There were many times in my life when I never thought I’d live until 2025. Also, we get two extra holidays in January, Jimmy Carter’s funeral and Martin Luther King Day on the 23rd.
So, what’s a trader to do in these suddenly benighted times? 90-day US Treasury bill looks fantastic right now with a 4.21% yield. Nothing is better than getting paid to wait. Big tech is entering a long-range trade from which it will eventually escape to the upside. A lot of the AI trade needs to be digested and earnings spun off before a major new upleg can begin.
One of the great things about a 16-day cruise from Los Angeles to Fort Lauderdale, Florida is the many fascinating people you meet. It turned out that I missed the start of the Great Los Angeles fires by a week.
I attended a wine tasting and learned that the entire event had been bought out by the preeminent aviation family of Alaska. The 93-year-old grandmother treated her extended 25-member family to a free cruise, great-grandchildren and all, at a cost of only $250,000. Apparently, aviation in Alaska pays well.
The subject of airplanes inevitably came up. They mentioned that they still had their original aircraft, a 1928 Travelaire D4D, which Grandpa bought second-hand and brought up to Alaska during WWII. They couldn’t get any of their current pilots to fly it, which they deemed too dangerous to fly.
I mentioned that I happened to be one of ten living pilots rated to fly the plane and showed them videos of me flying my kids over the Malibu coast (click here for the link).
I believe an invitation is pending.
We closed out December at +3.26%. Some 11 out of 12 months were profitable in 2024. The final number for 2024 came in at a sky-high +75.26%. I went all cash on the December 20 options expiration, expecting the current trouble that we are in. I would be thrilled if we even came close to these numbers in 2025.
I started out the New Year with 80% cash and two small hedged positions. I went long 10% (TLT) and long 10% (TSLA). These expire in four days on the January 17 option expiration, when we flip back to a 100% cash position.
Some 63 of my 70 round trips, or 90%, were profitable in 2023. Some 74 of 94 trades have been profitable so far in 2024, and several of those losses were really break-even. That is a success rate of +78.72%.
Try beating that anywhere.
My Ten-Year View – A Reassessment
When have to substantially downsize our expectations of equity returns in view of the election outcome. My new American Golden Age, or the next Roaring Twenties is now looking at a headwind. The economy will completely stop decarbonizing. Technology innovation will slow. Trade wars will exact a high price. Inflation will return. The Dow Average will rise by 600% to 240,000 or more in the coming decade. The new America will be far more efficient and profitable than the old.
My Dow 240,000 target has been pushed back to 2035.
On Monday, January 13 at 11:00 AM EST, the Consumer Inflation Expectations are released.
On Tuesday, January 14 at 8:30 AM, the Producer Price Index
is published.
On Wednesday, January 15 at 8:30 AM, the Inflation Rate is printed.
On Thursday, January 16 at 8:30 AM, the Retail Sales are announced.
On Friday, January 17 at 8:30 AM EST, Housing Starts and Building Permits are published. At 2:00 PM, the Baker Hughes Rig Count is printed.
As for me, I was recently in Los Angeles visiting old friends, and I am reminded of one of the weirdest chapters of my life.
There were not a lot of jobs in the summer of 1971, but Thomas Noguchi, the LA County Coroner, was hiring. The famed USC student jobs board had delivered! Better, yet, the job included hours at night and free housing at the coroner's department.
I got the graveyard shift, from midnight to 8:00 AM. All I had to do was buy a black suit from Robert Halls, for $25.
Noguchi was known as the “coroner to the stars” having famously done the autopsies on Marilyn Monroe and Jane Mansfield. He did not disappoint.
For three months, whenever there was a death from unnatural causes, I was there to pick up the bodies. If there was a suicide, gangland shooting, or horrific car accident, I was your man.
Charles Manson had recently been arrested and I was tasked with digging up the victims. One, cowboy stuntman Shorty Shay, had his head cut off and neatly placed in between his ankles.
The first time I ever saw a full set of women’s underclothing, a girdle, and pantyhose, was when I excavated a desert roadside grave that the coyotes had dug up. She was pretty far gone.
Once, me and another driver were sent to pick up a teenage boy who had committed suicide in Beverly Hills. The father came out and asked us to take the mattress as well. I regretted that we were not allowed to do favors on city time. He then said, “Can you take it for $200”, then an astronomical sum.
A few minutes later, I found a hearse driving down the Santa Monica Freeway on the way to the dump with a double mattress expertly tied on the roof with Boy Scout knots with a giant blood spot in the middle.
Once, I was sent to a cheap motel where a drug deal gone wrong had produced several shootings. I found $10,000 in a brown paper bag under the bed. The other driver found another ten grand and a bag of drugs and kept them. He went to jail. I didn’t.
The worst pick-up of the summer was also the most disgusting and even made the old veterans sick. A 300-pound man had died of a heart attack and was not discovered for a month. We decided to each grab an arm or leg and all tug on the count of three. One, two, three, and all four limbs came off!
Eventually, I figured out that handling dead bodies could be hazardous to your health, so I asked for rubber gloves. I was fired.
Still, I ended up with some of the best summer job stories ever.
Good Luck and Good Trading,
John Thomas
CEO & Publisher
The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader
Global Market Comments
January 8, 2025
Fiat Lux
2025 Annual Asset Class Review
A Global Vision
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