(SPY) Archives - Page 52 of 69 - Mad Hedge Fund Trader

The Market Outlook for the Week Ahead, Is the Bull Market Back?

During the Christmas Eve Massacre, a close friend sent me a research report he had just received entitled “30 Reasons Equities Will Fall in 2019.” It was laughable in its extreme negativity.

I thought this is it. This is the bottom. ALL of the bad news was there in the market. Stocks could only go up from here.

If I’d had WIFI at 12,000 feet on the ski slopes and if I’d thought you would be there to read them, I would have started shooting out Trade Alerts to followers right then and there. As it turned out, I had to wait a couple of days.

Two weeks later, and here I am basking in the glow of the hottest start to a new year in a decade, up 6.45%. So far in 2019, I am running a success rate of 100% ON MY TRADE ALERTS!

Don’t expect that to continue, but it is nice while it lasts.

I can clearly see how the year is going to play out from here. First of all, my Five Surprises of 2019 will play out during the first half of the year. In case you missed them, here they are.

*The government shutdown ends quickly

*The Chinese trade war ends

*The House makes no moves to impeach the president, focusing on domestic issues instead

*Britain votes to rejoin Europe

*The Mueller investigation concludes that Trump has an unpaid parking ticket in Queens from 1974 and that’s it.

*All of the above are HUGELY risk-positive and will trigger a MONSTER STOCK RALLY.

After that, the Fed will regain its confidence, raise interest rates two more times, and trigger a crash even worse than the one we just saw. We end up down on the year.

My long-held forecast that the bear market will start on May 10, 2019 at 4:00 PM EST is looking better than ever. However, I might be off by an hour. Those last hour algo-driven selloffs can be pretty vicious.

I make all of these predictions firmly with the knowledge that the biggest factors affecting stock prices and the economy are totally unpredictable, random, and could change at any time.

It was certainly an eventful week.

Fed governor Jay Powell essentially flipped from hawk to dove in a heartbeat, prompting a frenetic rally that spilled over into last week.

On the same day, China cut bank reserve requirements, instantly injecting $200 billion worth of stimulus into the economy. That’s the equivalent of spending $400 billion in the US. The last time they did this we saw a huge rally in stocks. It turns out that the Middle Kingdom has a far healthier balance sheet than the US.

Saudi Arabia chopped oil production by 500,000 barrels a day, sending prices soaring. It's not too late to get into what could be a 40% bottom to top rally to $62 (USO).

Macy's (M) disappointed, crushing all of retail with it, and taking down an overbought main market as well. It highlights an accelerating shift from brick and mortar to online, from analog to digital, and from old to new. Online sales in December grew 20% YOY. Will Amazon sponsor those wonderful Thanksgiving Day parades?

Home mortgage rates hit a nine-month low with the conventional 30-year fixed rate loan now wholesaling at an eye-popping 4.4%. Will it be enough to reignite the real estate market? It is actually a pretty decent time to start picking up investment properties with a long view.

My 2019 year to date return recovered to +6.45%, boosting my trailing one-year return back up to 31.68%. 2018 closed out at a respectable +23.67%.

My nine-year return nudged up to +307.35, just short of a new all-time high. The average annualized return revived to +33.90.

I analyzed my Q4 performance on the chart below. While the (SPY) cratered -19.5% in three short months, my Trade Alert Service hung in with only a -4.9% loss. The quarter was all about defense, defense, defense. It was the hardest quarter I ever worked.

While everything failed last year, everything has proven a success this year. I came back from vacation a week early to pile everyone into big tech longs in Salesforce (CRM), Microsoft (MSFT), and Amazon (AMZN). I doubled up my short position in the bond market.

I even added a long position in the Euro (FXE) for the first time in years. If Britain votes to stay in Europe, it is going to go ballistic.

I also top ticketed a near-record rally by laying out a few short positions in Apple (AAPL) and the S&P 500 (SPY). I am now neutral, with “RISK ON” positions “RISK OFF” ones.

The upcoming week is very iffy on the data front because of the government shutdown. Some data may be delayed and other completely missing. All of the data will be completely skewed for at least the next three months. You can count on the shutdown to dominate all media until it is over.

On Monday, January 14 Citigroup (C) announces earnings.

On Tuesday, January 15, 8:30 AM EST, the December Producer Price Index is out. Delta Airlines (DAL), JP Morgan Chase (JPM), and Wells Fargo (WFC) announce earnings.

On Wednesday, January 16 at 8:30 AM EST, we learn December Retail Sales. Alcoa (AA) and Goldman Sachs (GS) announce earnings.

At 10:30 AM EST the Energy Information Administration announces oil inventory figures with its Petroleum Status Report.

Thursday, January 17 at 8:30 AM EST, we get the usual Weekly Jobless Claims. At the same time, December Housing Starts are published. Netflix (NFLX) announces earnings.

On Friday, January 18, at 9:15 AM EST, December Industrial Production is out. The Baker-Hughes Rig Count follows at 1:00 PM. Schlumberger (SLB) announces earnings.

As for me, my girls have joined the Boy Scouts which has been renamed “Scouts.” Their goal is to become the first female Eagle Scouts.

So, I will retrieve my worn and dog-eared 1962 Boy Scout Manual and refresh myself with the ins and outs of square knots, taut line hitches, sheepshanks, and bowlines. Some pages are missing as they were used to start fires 55 years ago. I am already signed up to lead a 50-mile hike at Philmont in New Mexico next summer.

As for the Girl Scouts, they are suing the Boy Scouts to get the girls back, claiming that the BSA is infringing on its trademark, engaging in unfair competition, and causing “an extraordinary level of confusion among the public.”

Is there a merit badge for “Frivolous Lawsuits”?

Good luck and good trading.

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

January 11, 2019

Diary, Newsletter, Summary

Global Market Comments
January 11, 2019
Fiat Lux

Featured Trade:

(WHY THE MARKET CRASHED IN DECEMBER),
(SPY), ($INDU), (VIX)
(THE GOVERNMENT’S WAR ON MONEY),

(TESTIMONIAL)

Why the Market Crashed in December

Diary, Newsletter

Were you horrified by the market action in December? The next one could get much worse.

We are all used to market corrections. Live long enough and you will endure hundreds of them.

But December? That was a real first class crash, a four times a century event. And to see this occur in the face of solid economic data made it totally unexpected by all. The only analysts predicting a collapse like this one are the ones who have been expecting it daily for the past decade.

To see a 20% decline in NASDAQ and a 50% plunge in market leaders in the face of a 3.2% GDP growth rate and a 3.9% unemployment rate is a first. It makes no sense.

This wasn’t a correction. This was an instance where the market ceased to function and was effectively closed. In fact, it took a conspiracy of several independent forces to get the meltdown we got.

The bottom line here is that this is not your father’s stock market.

The low hanging fruit here is to blame in the high-frequency algorithms. But that is the cheap shot. Algos don’t care which way markets go. They take volatility up sharply, but they take it down as well, as any long-suffering vol player will tell you.

Over time, their market impact is neutral. And algo traders go home 100% in cash every night. That doesn’t explain opening meltdowns of 500 points a day or more. No, there was something much more structural at work.

Human emotions are easy to predict. Take the humans out of the equation and markets can only be read by mainframe computers, at least on a short-term basis. That’s why so many of these market traditions, like “Sell in May and go away,” and the “Santa Claus rally” have quit working.

Only about 10% of today’s daily traders are the breathing kind. The rest are all made of silicon. Even I have come to rely heavily on my own personal algorithms in the Mad Hedge Market Timing Index. It has been worth its weight in gold and saved my bacon many times.

There is no doubt that pure quant strategies have blood on their hands. These funds strictly adhere to rules that have identified the long-term relationships between different asset classes and act accordingly.

For example, when bonds go up, you sell them and buy more stock, but sell more foreign currencies as well, and perhaps pick up some copper as well. All of this is adjusted for risk and volatility. There is thought to be about $1.5 trillion committed to this kind of strategy.

Among these, you can include “risk parity traders” of the kind pioneered by my friend Ray Dalio in the 1990s. (Ray will tell you how he did it in his fascinating book, Principals, out last year). Ray, by the way, is one of the top performing money managers over the last 30 years.

Trend followers pour more gasoline on the fire. If you sell, they will sell more, creating these massive 100 handle days in the S&P 500 (SPY).

Heightening fears was a never-ending torrent of bad news out of Washington. Two out of three key cabinet positions were emptied by presidential firings and remain unoccupied. Trade talks with China came to an impasse. It was not what investors wanted to hear.

All of this set up the perfect storm for December.

Equity mutual fund redemptions hit a record $53 billion in early December. Market liquidity dramatically shrank as players took off for the holidays, as seen on the chart below. Liquidity during the second half of December was thinner than the worst days of the 2008 financial crisis.

A two-decade-long flight of capital from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange was also a factor. The inevitable result was for the Volatility Index (VIX) to take a run at its highs for the year.

If you wanted to sell anything in size, it could only take place at throwaway prices. It all culminated in the notorious Christmas Eve Massacre which saw a 1,000-point range day in the Dow Average in a holiday-shortened trading day. If it had been a full day it might have been down 2,000 points.

Don’t expect any respite from these strategies any time soon. In fact, we could see worse moves ahead. The current administration believes in a free market, non-interventionist approach to securities markets. That means no new regulation.

The same thing happened in the run-up to the 2008 crash when Christopher Cox (brother of my old boss at Morgan Stanley, Archie Cox) was basically told to go play golf instead of regulate.

Welcome to the new age of investing. The bottom line for all of us traders and investors is that we are going to have to pedal a lot harder to earn our crust of bread….or become a computer.

Did you Say “Buy” or “Sell”

January 10, 2019

Diary, Newsletter, Summary

Global Market Comments
January 10, 2019
Fiat Lux

Featured Trade:

(JANUARY 9 BIWEEKLY STRATEGY WEBINAR Q&A),
(SPY), (UUP), (FXE), (FXY), (FXA), (AAPL), (GLD), (SLV), (FCX), (SOYB), (USO), (MU), (NVDA), (AMD), (TLT), (TBT), (BIIB), (TSLA)
(TESTIMONIAL)

January 9 Biweekly Strategy Webinar Q&A

Diary, Newsletter

Due to technical problems, I was unable to read your questions. However, I was able to get a print out after the fact.

Below please find subscribers’ Q&A for the Mad Hedge Fund Trader January 9 Global Strategy Webinar with my guest and co-host Bill Davis of the Mad Day Trader.

Q: Is the bottom in for stocks?

A: It is for six months to a year. A price earnings multiple at 14X seems to be the line in the sand. The Christmas Eve massacre, which took us down to a (SPY) of $230, was the final capitulation bottom of the entire down move. We may try a few more retests of the lows on bad tweets or data points. But from here on, you’re trying to buy the dip. That’s why I cut my vacation short a week and issued eight emergency trade alerts, five for Global Trading Dispatch and three for the tech letter. By the way, I hope you appreciate those trade alerts because I had to call back staff from vacations in four different countries to get them done. But it was worth it. We’ve had the strongest start to a New Year in a decade, up 5.75%. We made back all our Q4 losses in two days!

Q: Is the strong dollar play (UUP) over? Is it time to start buying Euro (FXE) and Yen (FXE)?

A: Yes, it is. The Fed flipping from hawk to dove sounds the death knell for the dollar. With the expansion of the yield spread between the buck and other currencies stopped dead in its tracks, a massive short covering rally will drive the currencies higher. That’s why I bought the Euro on Monday for the first time in more than a year (FXE). The Japanese yen where the biggest shorts has already moved too far, up 8%. That’s where hedge fund typically finance positions because yen yields have been at zero forever.

Q: How about the Aussie (FXA)? Do we have a shot now?

A: I think so. But the bigger driver with Aussie is the trade war with China. That said, I believe that will get resolved soon too unless Trump wants to run for reelection during a recession. The Aussie also has relatively high-interest rates so it should soar.

Q: Is the government shutdown starting to hurt the economy?

A: Yes, it is. Estimates on the damage the shutdown is doing range from 0.5% to 1% a week. That means at a minimum of 20-week shut down cuts 2019 GDP growth by 1%. If your assumption for growth this year is only 2%, that brings us perilously close to a recession. However, with the big stock market rally of the past week investors clearly believe the shutdown will be over in a week. Buy “Wall” stocks.

Q: What’s the biggest risk to the market now?

A: Companies announced great earnings in October and the stocks promptly collapsed. Q4 earnings start in a few weeks, except this time, the earnings will be smaller. The big one, Apple (AAPL) is reporting on January 29 and will be especially exciting since they already announced a major disappointment. If we get a repeat, you could get another meltdown in February just like we saw last year.

Q: Do you still like gold (GLD)?

A: I did in Q4 as a hedge for a collapsing stock market. Now that stocks are on fire again, I think gold and silver (SLV) will take a rest. You’re not going to get a serious move in gold until we see higher inflation and that is a while off.

Q: Is the bear market in commodities over?

A: I think so, with a flattening interest rate picture and a weakening dollar, the entire commodity complex is looking better. That includes copper (FCX), energy (USO), and the ags (SOYB). What do you buy in an expensive market? Cheap stuff, and all of these are at seven-year lows. I think people are ready to give paper assets a rest. All we need now for these to work is inflation. My cleaning lady just asked for a raise so there’s hope.

Q: The semiconductors have just had a good move. Is it time to get in?

A: You want to buy the semis, like Micron Technology (MU), NVIDIA (NVDA), and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) when they’ve just had a BAD move. Market conditions have improved, but not to the extent you want to buy the most volatile stocks in the market. That said, if we get another crushing move in February you might dip your toe in with some semis on capitulation day. If you want to buy semis in this environment, you might have a gambling addiction.

Q: If the Fed has stopped raising rates, are you still bearish on the (TLT) and bullish on the (TBT)?

A: I think what governor Jay Powell’s dovish comments will do is put bonds in a six-month range, say 2.45%-3.0% in yield. All of my future bond alerts will trade around those levels. In the option world, we will be setting up a short strangle, betting that interest rates don’t move out of this range for a while. In that case, our two bond positions will be OK, with the nearest money one expiring in only seven trading days.

Q: Is it too late to get into biotech (BIIB)?

A: No, along with technology, biotech will be one of the two leading sectors in the entire market for the next ten years. However, me being an eternal cheapskate, I want to get in again on a decent dip. This is the industry that will cure cancer over the next decade and that will be worth a trillion dollars in profits.

Q: You’ve kept us out of Tesla (TSLA) for a couple of years. Is it time to go back in?

A: I think I would. If production can ramp up from 7,000 to 10,000 a week, the stock should do the same. The ten-year view for this stock is that it goes from today’s $330 to $2,500. That said, this is a notorious trading stock so it is very important to buy it on a dip. Wait for the next tweet from Elon Musk.

Q: If we enter a bear market in May 2019, what would be the appropriate long-term investments at that time?

A: Nothing beats cash, especially now that you are actually getting paid something decent. You can find cash equivalents now yielding all the way up to 4%. In a bear market, stocks either go down a lot, or a whole lot, so there is nothing worth keeping. The only reason to stay in is to avoid a monster tax bill (my cost on Apple is 25 cents) or you still work for the company.

December 20, 2018

Diary, Newsletter, Summary

Global Market Comments
December 20, 2018
Fiat Lux

Featured Trade:

(THE GLASS HALF EMPTY MARKET)
($INDU), (SPY)
(HOW TO EXECUTE A VERTICAL BULL CALL SPREAD),
(AAPL)

The Glass Half Empty Market

Diary, Newsletter, Research

Dovish, but not dovish enough.

That seems to be the judgment of the markets today in the wake of the Fed’s decision to raise interest rates by 25 basis points. The overnight range for Fed funds is now 2.25%-2.50%.

The Dow Average soared by 350 points going into the decision. Then it plunged by 900 points to 23,200, a new low for 2018. It was one of the largest range days in market history.

Traders chose to focus only on the bad news and completely ignore the good. That makes this a totally “glass half empty” market.

Never mind Chairman Jerome Powell’s statement that the Fed was cutting back its 2019 forecast from three interest rate hikes to only two. Stocks should have rallied 1,000 points on just that! And they still might!

Powell also redefined the meaning of the word “neutral”, taking it down from 3.0% to 2.8%. That means only one more quarter-point hike would take us to the low end of neutral, and that might be it. That should have been worth another 1,000 points, and we still might get that as well.

The Fed affirmed that the economy is still generally strong and that unemployment is at historic lows. Nothing to worry about here.

You can see where I’m going with this.

Down 3,800 points from the October high, stocks are now approaching stupidly cheap prices and valuations. Call it insanely cheap. What we are seeing here is the coiling up of a spring that will lead to an explosive upside move.

That may happen with the quadruple witching options expiration on Friday, the last real trading day of the year. It may wait until January 2, the first trading day of 2019. But coming it is.

And let me throw a theory at you which a hedge fund friend bounced off of me yesterday while I was on one of my legendary night hikes.

What if we really have been in a bear market since January 31 and we are now approaching the end of it? That would give us a typical one-year long bear market from which we are about to blast out to the upside.

When does this new bull market begin? When the last week hands intent on avoiding another 2008 repeat bails on their holdings. In other words, it could happen any day now.

Interesting food for thought.

December 17, 2018

Diary, Newsletter, Summary

Global Market Comments
December 17, 2018
Fiat Lux

Featured Trade:

(THE MARKET OUTLOOK FOR THE WEEK AHEAD, or THERE’S NO SANTA CLAUS IN CHINA)
($INDU), (SPY), (TLT), (AAPL), (AMZN), (NVDA), (PYPL), (NFLX)

The Market Outlook for the Week Ahead, or There’s No Santa Claus in China

Diary, Newsletter

On Friday, five serious hedge fund managers separately called me out of the blue and all had the same thing to say. They had never seen the market so negative before in the wake of the worst quarter in seven years. Therefore, it had to be a “BUY”.

I, on the other hand, am a little more cautious. I have four 10% positions left that expire on Friday, in four trading days, and on that day I am going 100% into cash. At that point, I will be up 3.5% for the month of December, up 31.34% on the year, and will have generated positive return for one of the worst quarters in market history.

I’m therefore going to call it a win and head for the High Sierras for a well-earned Christmas vacation. After that, I am going to wait for the market to tell me what to do. If it collapses, I’ll buy it. If it rockets, I’ll sell short. And I’ll tell you why.

These are not the trading conditions you would expect when the economy is humming along at a 2.8% annual rate, unemployment is running at a half-century low, and earnings are growing a 26% year on year. You can’t find a parking spot in a shopping mall anywhere.

However, the lead stocks like Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN), and Netflix (NFLX) have plunged by 30%-60%. Price earnings multiples dropped by a stunning 27.5% from 20X to 14.5X in a mere ten weeks. Half of the S&P 500 (SPY) is in a bear market, although the index itself isn’t there yet. I would rather be buying markets on their way up than to try and catch a falling knife.

There is only one catalyst for that apparent yawning contradiction: The President of the United States.

Trump has created a global trade war solely on his own authority. Only he can end it. As a result, asset classes of every description are beset with uncertainty, confusion, and doubt about the future. Analysts are shaving 2019 growth forecasts as fast as they can, businesses are postponing capital spending plans, and investors are running for the sidelines in droves. Business confidence is falling like a rock

To paraphrase a saying they used to teach you in Marine Corps flight school, “It’s better to be in cash wishing you were fully invested than to be fully invested wishing you were in cash.”

The Chinese have absolutely no interest in caving into Trump’s wishes. They read the New York Times, see the midterm election result and the opinion polls, and are willing to bet that they can get a much better deal from a future president in two years.

I have been dealing personally with both Trump and the Chinese government for four decades. The Middle Kingdom measures history in Millenia. The president lives from tweet to tweet. The Chinese government can take pain by simply ordering its people to take it. We have elections every two years with immediate consequences.

The best we can hope for is that the president folds, declares victory, and then retreats from his personal war. This can happen at any time, or it may not happen at all. No one has an advantage in predicting what will happen with any certainty. Not even the president knows what he is going to do from minute to minute.

It is the possibility of trade peace at any time that has kept me out of the short side of the stock market in this severe downturn. That robs a real hedge fund manager of half his potential income. Trade peace could be worth an instant rally of 10% in the stock market. Even a lesser move, like the firing of trade advisor Peter Navarro, would accomplish the same.

The market was long overdue for a correction like the one we have just had. Investors were getting overconfident, cocky, and excessively leveraged. In October, we really needed the tide to go out to see who was swimming without a swimsuit. But if the tide goes out too far, we will all appear naked.

Thanks to some very artful trading, my year to date return recovered to +27.54% boosting my trailing one-year return back up to 27.54%. I covered an aggressive short position in the bond market (TLT) for a welcome 14.4% profit. I also took profits with an instant winner in PayPal (PYPL). On the debit side, I stopped out of an Apple call spread for a minimal loss.

December is showing a very modest loss at -0.26%. The market has become virtually untradeable now, with tweets and China rumors roiling markets for 500 points at a pop. And this is against a Dow Average that is down a miserable -2.8% so far in 2018. I should have listened to my mother when she wanted me to become a doctor.

My nine-year return nudged up to +304.01. The average annualized return revived to +33.77.

The upcoming week is all about housing data, with the big focus on the Fed’s interest rate hike on Wednesday.

Monday, December 17 at 10:00 AM EST, the November Homebuilders Index is out.

On Tuesday, December 18 at 8:30 AM, November Housing Starts are published.

On Wednesday, December 19 at 10:00 AM EST, November Existing Home Sales are released.

At 10:30 AM EST the Energy Information Administration announces oil inventory figures with its Petroleum Status Report.

At 2:00 PM the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee announces a 25 basis point rise in interest rates, taking the overnight rate to 2.25% to 2.50%. An important press conference with governor Jay Powell follows.

Thursday, December 20 at 8:30 AM EST, we get Weekly Jobless Claims.

On Friday, December 21, at 8:30 AM EST, we learn the latest revision to Q3 GDP which now stands at 2.8%.

The Baker-Hughes Rig Count follows at 1:00 PM.

As for me, I’ll be battling snow storms driving up to Lake Tahoe where I’ll be camping out for the next two weeks. Mistletoe, eggnog, and endless games of Monopoly and Scrabble await me.

Good luck and good trading!

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