Global Market Comments
September 4, 2020
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
Below please find subscribers’ Q&A for the September 2 Mad Hedge Fund Trader Global Strategy Webinar broadcast from Silicon Valley, CA with my guest and co-host Bill Davis of the Mad Day Trader. Keep those questions coming!
Q: Tesla (TSLA) is down 25% today from the Monday high. What are your thoughts?
A: Yes, I've been recommending to people all last week that they dump their big leverage positions, like their one- and two-year LEAPS in Tesla and quite a few people got out at the absolute highs near $2,500 just before the new stock issue was announced. People who bought the Tesla convertible bonds ten years ago got an incredible tenfold return, plus interest!
Q: Are we at-the-money at the bear put spread in (SPY)?
A: Yes, and if we go any higher, you are going to get a stop loss in your inbox because I have good performance this year to protect. I do this automatically without thinking about it. In this kind of crazy market, you cannot run shorts indefinitely. Hope is not a strategy. And it’s easy to stop out of a loser when 90% of the time you know the next one is going to be a winner.
Q: Doesn’t gold (GLD) normally go up in falling stock markets?
A: Yes, in a normal market that’s what it does. The problem is that all asset classes have produced identical charts in the last 2.5 years, and when they all go up in unison, they all go down in unison. This time around, gold will sell off with the stock market and gold miners (GDX) will go down three times as fast. Remember gold miners are stocks first and gold plays second, so when a big stock dive hits, will see big dives in gold miners as well, as we saw in February and March.
Q: Why is JP Morgan (JPM) a good buy?
A: JP Morgan is the quality play in the banks. And once inflation starts to kick in and interest rates rise, and you get a positive yield curve and a strengthening economy—that is fantastic news for banks. They are also one of the few underperforming sectors left in the market, so in any stock market selloff banks will rise. And that’s JP Morgan (JPM), Bank of America (BAC), Citigroup (C) that will lead the charge. Avoid Wells Fargo (WFC). It’s still broken.
Q: I see iPath Series B S&P 500 VIX Short Term Futures ETN (VXX) starting to move up. Should we buy it?
A: Only on dips and only if you expect a dramatic selloff in the stock market very soon, which I do. The (VXX) trade is very high risk. The contango is huge. I tried making money on it a couple of times this year and failed both times; this really is for professional intraday traders in Chicago with an inside look at customer order flows. Retail traders rarely make money on the (VXX) trade—usually, they get killed.
Q: Will gold hold up as interest rates rise?
A: No, it won’t. Rising interest rates are death for gold and other precious metals. Your gold theory is that interest rates stay lower for longer, which the Fed has essentially already promised us.
Q: What do you think of the United States Treasury Bond Fund (TLT)?
A: I’m looking to sell shorts in big size as I did in the spring and I’m looking for five-point rallies to sell into. I missed the last one last week because it just rolled over so fast on an opening gap down that you couldn’t get any trade alerts out, and that’s happening more and more. So, if we get going up to $166-$167, that will be a decent short and then you want to be doing something like the $175-$178 vertical bear put spread in October. I don’t think bonds are going to go to 0% interest rates, I think the real range is 50-95 basis points in a 10-year treasury yield. That is your trading range.
Q: Do you think big oil (USO) will transform into a low carbon energy industry if Biden wins?
A: I’ve been telling big oil that that’s what they’re going to have to do for 20 years. They all read Mad Hedge Fund Trader. And, they always laugh, saying oil will be dominant at least until 2050. Since then, they have become the worst-performing sector of the S&P 500 on a 20-year view, and my thought is that eventually, big oil takes over and buys the entire alternative energy industry, and slowly pulls out of oil. They have the engineering talent to pull it off and they have the cash to make the acquisitions. They will have to reinvent themselves or go out of business, just like everybody else.
Q: What could trigger the stock market pullback you mention in your slides? Because the bullish Fed quantitative easing trade is hard to stop.
A: It’s like the 2000 top, there was no one thing or even a couple things, that could trigger the top. It’s just the sheer weight of prices and exhaustion of new buyers, and that is impossible to see in advance, so all you can do is watch your charts. One down out of the blue the Dow Average ($INDU) will suddenly drop 1,000 points for no reason.
Q: When you say Europe is recovering, which data indicates this?
A: Well, when you look at Q2 GDP growth in Europe, they were only down 10% while the US was down 26%. That is purely a result of Europe having a much more aggressive COVID-19 response than the United States. There is no mask debate in Europe, it’s like 100% compliance. Here you have blue states wearing masks and red states not. The result of that, of course, is that the death rate in the red states is about five times higher than it is in blue states, on a per capita basis. That is why the US has the highest infection rate in the world, the highest death rate, and is why we lost an extra 16% of GDP growth in Q2.
Q: Will you trade a short Tesla again?
A: No, I’ve been hit twice on Tesla shorts in the last six months and we are now in La La land—it’s essentially untradable. I got a lot of people out of Tesla earlier this week, and then they announced their share new $5 billion issue, which they should have done a while ago
Q: Is there any way to play the home mortgage refi boom in the stock market with the 30-year mortgages at a record low 2.88%?
A: You buy the banks. If you call your bank and ask for a refi quote, it might be a week before they get back to you, they are so busy. Banks are also getting enormous subsidies from all these various lending and stimulus type programs, so money is raining down on them right now. Banks are now the cheapest sector in the market, selling at 6x earnings. It is probably the single greatest sector in the stock market right now to buy.
Q: I’ve been holding the ProShares UltraShort 20 year Plus Treasury fund (TBT) and it is moving up and down in the short-range. Should I sell?
A: No, I think we have more room to go on the (TBT), I think we could get to $18, which is about a 0.90% yield in the US Treasury bond market.
Q: Do you have a target on Tesla?
A: Well, my downside target would be its old breakout level. So, divide by five and you get $300. That equates to $1450 in the pre-split price. So, we could have a real monster selloff, like 40%, once this market loses momentum. It’s safe to say don’t buy Tesla up here.
Q: Is the ProShares UltraShort S&P 500 ETF (SDS) offering a good entry point here?
A: It is as soon as we rollover. In these momentum-driven markets, it’s best to wait for proof of a top before you start getting fancy with short plays. You can see how I got hammered several times in the last month by being too early on my shorts; and fortunately, I was able to hedge out most of those losses. You might not be able to do so.
Q: Are you planning on keeping your Fortinet spread?
A: Yes, to expiration, which is only 11 days off, unless we get an out-of-the-blue meltdown.
Q: Do you like Ali Baba (BABA)?
A: Yes; that is essentially a play on a Biden win in the election. If he wins, our war with China will cease and all of the China plays will go ballistic as we return to international trade, which has been powering our economy for the last 70 years.
Q: What about cruise lines like Carnival (CCL)?
A: I know they’re cheap. They’re selling out their 2021 summer cruises with customers betting that there will be a corona vaccine by then, or simply not caring whether there is a pandemic or not. The dedicated cruisers are desperate to cruise. That’s one reason why these stocks are holding up, but I don’t want to touch them. I think the recovery will take much longer than people realize.
Q: When do you buy gold?
A: Wait for a bigger dip.
Q: Should I be holding gold for the long term?
A: Yes; if you don’t want to trade it, just sitting on your position is fine. I think gold eventually goes to 3,000 after hitting an initial target of 2,200.
Good Luck and Stay Healthy
John Thomas
CEO & Publisher
The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader
Global Market Comments
June 12, 2020
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(WHEN THE BILL COMES DUE)
(SPY), (TLT), (GD), (USO), (HTZ), (JCP)
This was a top you could see coming a mile off. Now, the correction for the greatest rally in stock market history has begun. Will it be the greatest correction in history?
It could be.
It was the awful news that the Coronavirus is starting to run away again that started the panic. New cases in Texas and Arizona are growing so fast that the local hospital systems are getting overwhelmed once again. The Armageddon scenario is back on the table once again.
You knew we were in trouble when the stocks of bankrupt companies, like Hertz (HTZ) and JC Penny (JCP) started doubling in a day, even though they have no equity value whatsoever. They were bid up simply because they had low single-digit prices, as bankrupt companies always do.
They were bid up by greater fools and the market just ran out of them.
It wasn’t just equities that got slammed. Oil (USO) suffered a horrific day, down 8.2%. because of burgeoning inventories leftover from a dead-in-the water economy. Bonds rocketed three points and are up an eye-popping 11 points from last week. Even gold (GLD) failed to move, held back by widespread margin calls.
It seems we have returned to the terrors of February-March, the down 2,000 points a day kind. There was barely a rally all day. It basically went straight down. How much more is there to go? Let’s look at the obvious targets in the S&P 500 (SPY) and the distance from the Monday top.
$299 – Down 7.7% from the top – the 200-day moving average and top of the April - May double top
$288.74 – Down 10.9% - The 50-day moving average
$272 – Down 15% - bottom of the April - May double bottom
$262 – Dow 19.4% - Top of the initial rally off the March 23 bottom and the level where a new bear market is declared. Two bear markets in two quarters?
$219 – Down 32.6% - the March 23 low gets retested.
There is quite a lot to chew on here. In the end, it will depend on how much the first Corona wave ramps up after a far too early re-opening. Even if there are no further shutdowns of the economy, a world where consumers are too afraid to leave their homes doesn’t generate a lot of growth or earnings.
When the president says things are great, but you see 5% of normal traffic in the local shopping mall, you want to run a mile.
Forget about the second wave, we haven’t even gotten out of the first wave yet. Corona deaths topped 114,000 today. We could hit 250,000 by August, not a great mall traffic generator.
If the selloff continues, and it probably will until the Q2 earnings are published starting in mid-July, then this is the dip you want to buy. For if the lows hold, we will be at the beginning of a 400% move in the main indexes over the next decade.
To get the depth of the argument why this will happen, please read about the coming Roaring Twenties and the next American Golden Age by clicking here.
Here is what you want to do on this move down:
*Stocks - buy big dips
*Bonds – sell rallies aggressively
*Commodities - buy dips
*Currencies - sell US dollar rallies
*Precious Metals – buy dips
*Energy – stand aside
*Volatility - sell short over $50
*Real Estate – buy dips
And buy LEAPS (Long Term Equity Anticipation Securities), lots of LEAPS. This is where traders have been picking up 500%-1,000% returns this year.
Stay Healthy,
John Thomas
CEO & Publisher
The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader
Global Market Comments
May 14, 2020
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(TEN UGLY MESSAGES FROM THE BOND MARKET),
(TLT), (TBT), (USO), (GLD), (GS), (SPY)
The global bond markets have been screaming an ugly message at us loud and clear, and I’m afraid that it’s not a positive one.
Amazingly, US Treasury bonds have soared early this year, taking the (TLT) up a stunning 40 points.
In the meantime, stocks have suffered the sharpest crash in history, plunging ten times faster than the worst days of the 1929 crash, down 37%.
The implications for your investment portfolio are so momentous and far-reaching that I am going to have to list them one by one.
Read them and weep:
1) The US is in a severe depression.
2) The pandemic is not even close to ending. US deaths topped 85,000 yesterday and may triple from here.
3) The presidential election has become a major source of instability, and no one has any idea of how this will all end. Trump is currently trying to bankrupt the US Post Office to frustrate mail-in voting.
4) The immigration crisis is reaching a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. It has become our Syria, which landed four million immigrants in Europe.
5) The stock market is in the process of crashing…. Again, failing dramatically at the 200-day moving average. That “Sell in May” thing may work big time this year.
6) The Trump trade is toast. Financials, commodity, energy, coal, and industrial stocks are leading the charge to the downside.
7) Oil (USO) is in free fall and may go negative again, another classic recession predictor. For the first time in history. Most small and medium-sized energy companies will go under. Coal has dropped to a historic low of 19% of US electricity production, less than total alternative sources, and is never coming back.
8) Bitcoin is rocketing, up an eye-popping 100% since the crash began. This has become the big hot money trade of 2020 in addition to that other great flight to safety trade, gold (GLD).
9) The US dollar (UUP) is flatlining, wiping out the growth of the foreign earnings of US multinationals. Foreign economies are collapsing even faster than ours, taking their interest rates and currencies lower at warp speed.
10) The unemployment rate, now at all-time lows, not bottom out for months. The great irony here is that while the president vociferously campaigned on an aggressive jobs program, he may well preside over the biggest job losses in history. The Fed is targeting total unemployment of 52 million, worst than the Great Depression.
For more on this, please read my recent piece, “Why You Will Lose Your Job in the Next Five Years and What to Do About It” by clicking here.
There is another alternative explanation to all of this.
A certain Monty Python sketch about a parrot comes to mind.
That all we saw a giant short squeeze in the hedge funds’ core short position in bonds for the umpteenth time, and that we are almost done.
Hedge funds have grown in size to where they are now the perfect contrary market indicator. It is the classic “Too many people in one side of the canoe” trade. A Yogi Berra quote comes to mind; “Nobody goes there anymore because it is too crowded.”
There are other structural factors at play here which are hard to beat. For more on this, please read my opus on “Why Are Bond Yields So Low” by clicking here.
Global Market Comments
April 24, 2020
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(APRIL 22 BIWEEKLY STRATEGY WEBINAR Q&A),
(SPY), (INDU), (GILD), (NEM), (GOLD), (USO),
(SOYB), (CORN), (SHOP), (PALL), (AMZN)
Global Market Comments
April 21, 2020
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(OIL CATACLYSM)
(USO), (XLE)
I spent the day trying to charter a 500,000-tonne oil tanker.
No luck.
If I had found one, I could have bought oil at the close of the market today at negative -$37.78 a barrel and then immediately resold it for June delivery for $21, generating an instant $57.78 a barrel profit. At 7.33 barrels a metric ton that gives me a $211 million profit. All I have to do is keep the oil for a month. Big hedge funds are doing this right now.
When I toured Australia in February, I warned investors that crude would fall from $80 to $10 by 2030, which many called extreme. I warned them to get out of all energy investments immediately, as I have done with you for the past several years. It is an industry that is going the way of the buggy whip maker.
Instead, we saw a move from $80 to negative -$37 in two months. They must think I’m some kind of idiot, clueless about the functioning of this important commodity market, despite having invested and worked in the industry for five years.
Of course, the wild prices are a product of the futures market, where financial derivatives outnumber the underlying physical market by 100 to one. Anyone who buys here today has to take delivery by 2:30 EST on Tuesday. With all the world’s storage and shipping already committed that is impossible. You literally can’t give oil away right now.
All transportation use of oil has virtually ceased. Most airlines are grounded, no ships are sailing, and nobody is driving anymore. Of the world’s potential daily oil supply, we have crashed from 100 million b/d to 65 b/d in two months. It is a move unprecedented in history.
Throwing gasoline on the fire are 16 supertankers which sailed from Saudi Arabia but for which there are no buyers.
This panic is happening in the face of Cushing, Oklahoma’s storage capacity which is now at 61 million barrels and could be at its limit of 78 million barrels in a couple of weeks. Then where does the Texas tea go?
Since June futures are still trading at $21, I believe this carnage is due to the future expiration and should pass in a few days. But unless more storage shows up out of the blue, or the industry shuts in production of 35 million b/d, the Armageddon in the futures market will become a monthly affair.
All eyes are now on the United States Oil Fund (USO), which liquidated all its May oil contracts two weeks ago to avoid precisely this kind of debacle. All longs were rolled forward to June contracts, which expire on May 19, and into July.
(USO) now owns one-third of all June oil contracts. Some $1.5 billion poured into the (USO) last week, which then immediately dropped in value by half.
I know this sounds insane, but if you bought the (USO) at the Monday close of $3.75 and it returns to the $5.00 where it was trading last Thursday and oil was trading at $25 you should be able to make a quick 33% on your money in a few days.
I wouldn’t let this trade grow hair on it. I’ll be selling on the first rally. That’s why I’m only going with a 5% position instead of the usual 10%. Now is not the time to get greedy in the oil market.
Eventually, supply and demand will come into balance from a combination of production cuts and demand increases from a recovering global economy. Best guess is that happens in July or August at the earliest. OPEC has already cut production by 10 million barrels a day for two months and 8 million b/d for the rest of the year. After that, oil could trade back as high as $40 a barrel.
If oil stays this low for too long, the geopolitical implications are immense. There will be a second Russian Revolution, which depends on crude sales for 70% of total government revenues.
Saudi Arabia will go up in flames and the royal family will flee to Geneva, Switzerland where their money is, leaving 34 million citizens to perish. What population did the country support before the post-war oil industry took off in 1950? About 4 million. I remember Saudi Arabia in the 1960s and it was not a pleasant place. People walked barefoot on 150-degree sands.
But I diverge.
At some point, another trade of the century on the long side of oil is out there. But the price of being early is high.
A “BUY” Signal?Global Market Comments
March 23, 2020
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(MARKET OUTLOOK FOR THE WEEK AHEAD, or WELCOME TO THE GREAT DEPRESSION),
(INDU), (SPY), (GS), (MS), (FXI), (USO), (TSLA)
