It was known as the ?Tweet that sank Wall Street.?
When presidential candidate Hillary Clinton attacked the drug industry last summer, the entire pharmaceutical and health care industries were taken out to the woodshed and beaten like the proverbial red headed stepchild (my apologies in advance to red heads).
One of the principal victims was cancer drug maker Celgene (CELG), which dropped some 24.6% from top to bottom.
Never mind that Clinton is unlikely to get what she wants, even if she wins the election.
For that, you need a congress in your pocket, a probability that is at least 5-9 years away.
That is, unless Donald Trump continues his campaign for the Republican nomination.
However, in this nervous, twitchy, gun shy trading environment, it is shoot first and ask questions latter. So Celgene shares sank, whether it was warranted or not.
Celgene is really all about one drug, Revlimid, a blood cancer treatment that accounts for 75% of its sales. Last year, the company sold $7.6 billion worth of this complex molecule.
To wean itself off of its overdependence on a single drug it has embarked on a number of aggressive initiatives.
Since the spring of 2012, it has increased the use of its Abrazane drug to treat late stage pancreatic cancer, the disease that killed Steve Jobs. It has won regulatory approval for the psoriasis drug Otezla.
It has also pursued the mergers and acquisitions road to growth, picking up some two-dozen small drug makers in recent years. The $7.2 billion purchase of Receptos was a big one, which manufactures Ozanimod, a drug used to treat ulcerative colitis and multiple sclerosis.
Celgene also picked up Juno Therapeutics for $1 billion a few months ago, a maker of innovative cellular immunotherapies.
If this ambitious strategy works, Celgene?s net earnings should continue to grow at a 25% annual rate for the next five years. That means the shares should triple by 2020.
This is why the company?s shares command a lofty multiple of 18 times 2016 earnings, the higher end of the range for this industry.
So the next time Hillary opens her mouth, use the dip in (CELG) shares to load the boat. It would also be helpful if stock investors shift their focus from value back to growth.
Looks Like a ?BUY? To Me
Loose Lips Sink Ships
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Hillary-Clinton-e1446065472317.jpg253400Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2015-10-29 01:08:492015-10-29 01:08:49Celgene Will Make a Comeback
I am going to continue to use this correction in the stock market as an opportunity to put new names in front of you for inclusion in your investment portfolio.
That way, when the markets turn, you can strike with the speed of a rattlesnake in returning to a ?RISK ON? posture.
Major turnarounds are not the time to engage in deep, fundamental research. It is when you should be pulling the trigger on Trade Alerts, which you have wisely spent time lining up.
This brings me back to my three core sectors for long-term investment, technology, health care, and energy. For a four cyclical play, you can add the financials as an interest rate play.
Which brings me to one of my perennial favorites, Gilead Sciences (GILD). Long-term readers will recall this big momentum name, which I first recommended last December at $75 a share. It hit $125 in June, last week, and could fly as high as $200 in 2016.
Obamacare is proving to by one of the greatest windfalls in the history of the health care industry. More than 45 million new individuals now enjoy government guaranteed payments for health care services for the first time. In addition, millions more are signing up for private insurance.
One of the cleanest shots at this new profit stream is Gilead Sciences. The ticker symbol seems so appropriate for this new Golden Age for the health care industry.
(GILD) is an American biotechnology company that discovers, develops and commercializes treatments for a range of different diseases. The California based firm initially concentrated on antiviral drugs to treat patients infected with HIV, hepatitis B, or influenza.
In 2006, Gilead acquired two companies that were developing drugs to treat patients with pulmonary diseases.
These are all expected to be huge growth areas in the future, and the company has become a favorite of hedge fund traders. Both the shares and the sector have been on fire all year.
Don?t rush out and buy (GILD) today. Rather, I?d wait until the last of the sellers get flushed out in this correction, which will probably not be until well into October.
Take a look at the charts below, and they suggest that the S&P 500 could reach as low as 1,976, or down another 160 handles from here.
That will give us another top to bottom pullback of 12.52%, which certainly qualifies as a healthy correction. This will be the time to load the boat with (GILD).
Keep close tabs on your text message service and email, and I?ll let you know when it is time to lay your cajones on the line once more.
Yes, It?s $1,000 a Pill
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Pills-e1411767040932.jpg226400Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2015-10-01 01:06:142015-10-01 01:06:14Keep Gilead Sciences on Your Radar
Basking in the glow of the spectacular 22% profit by the Trade Alert Service so far in 2015, I sat down on a rock on a high mountain the other day to try and figure out what happened.
The last time I saw a move this healthy was back in 2013, when I clocked a 68% gain for the year.
During the 1990?s, we saw a perfect trifecta of the Internet going mainstream, cheap graphical user interface enabled personal computers, and an easy to use World Wide Web that conspired to create a Dotcom boom and send risk assets everywhere ballistic.
Sure, the advent of cheap domestic energy unleashed by the fracking and horizontal drilling of natural gas is a game changer of similar magnitude.
But that isn?t enough to suddenly convert every investor from a pessimist to an optimist, a Cassandra to a Pollyanna, or a bear to a bull.
So what else is helping to send stocks ever Northward?
Fortunately, I brought along an abacus with me to my high altitude retreat. So I ran a few numbers.
Approximately 18% of US GDP is derived from the health care industry in some form or another. In Europe they spend only 8%, live longer and certainly eat better food (I spent two months field testing it last summer).
So what happens when America?s Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, brings our spending down to European levels? The savings would amount to 10% of GDP, or $1.6 trillion. That is a handsome amount of change.
Where would all of this money go? The short answer is: to you and me. To be precise, I get half, and you get half, which works out to $800 billion for each of us, per year.
The reality is a little more complicated than that. We are not going to get our new found wealth in unmarked bills stuffed in a duffle bag left at a dead drop in the middle of the night.
Rather, the payoff will come in an indirect form. We will get better quality health care for less money, and more of us will get it, some 48 million to be precise.
Oh, and we get to live longer too.
What are we going to do with this windfall? Buy stocks, and lots of them. At least that?s what the stock market thinks. Hence, the ballistic move in equities. This year could be just as good.
In fact, we will be buying a lot of everything, which is why the auto industry is on fire, real estate is recovering, yet the bond market hasn?t crashed.
This amount of money hitting the financial system over the coming decade could well be the appetizer to an investment ?Golden Age? during the 2020?s.
This is fabulous news for asset owners of all stripes, and pretty good for everyone else as well. Companies with rising share prices are much more likely to hire and expand capital investment than those with falling ones, raising standards of living.
The way this happens is what makes Obamacare so interesting, unlike the purely government sponsored plans now in operation in Europe and Asia. It does this with a heavy reliance on the private sector to unleash free market capitalism on the health care industry for the first time in its history.
At last, they will be thrown into the merciless pit of dog eat dog, cutthroat competition where the rest of us have already been living for quite some time. They will be the losers, and we will be the winners.
I have been studying health care for about 40 years now. I was once destined to become a medical researcher at the Center for Disease in Atlanta. But the Defense Department found out I was pretty good with numbers, and I found myself in a bleak part of Northern Nevada now known as Area 51.
When improving relations with the Soviet Union wound things down there and all the aliens went home, there was nowhere else for me to go but the stock market. Suffice it to say, I still know which end of a test tube to hold up.
Health care is the last 19th century industry that operates in this country (except possibly for coal mining). It is fragmented into local monopolies spread amongst the country?s 3,141 counties.
I haven?t had health insurance myself for seven years. After paying on a Blue Cross of California policy for 20 years, they suddenly cancelled my policy claiming an alleged pre existing condition. My real pre existing condition was that I was a 55-year-old white male, and was not a great risk.
Since I was paying out of pocket for every trip to the doctor, I became an expert on what things cost. The first thing that I learned is that no one in a doctor?s office knows what anything costs. They deliberately don?t know. That way they can feign innocence when you get hit with a whopping big bill.
It was only with the greatest persistence that I was able to chase down the actual dollar cost of tests and procedures. Needless to say, my health care providers considered me a nut case and a pain in the ass and kindly offered a referral to a mental health professional. Some actually refused me care.
This is the land of the $100 plastic hypodermic needle, the $300 paper gown, and the $1,000 saline drip (its salt water). MRI Scans can cost $6,000, or $1,500 at the hospital down the street.
In fact, I?ve had friends show up for procedures at hospitals with a $3 gown they bought on Ebay, but were still forced to use the identical $300 version.
This is why the wealthiest guy in the county is often the one who runs the local hospital, or sells specialized prescribed treatments and procedures, to be reimbursed by the government.
From 1995 to 2012, dermatologists saw a 50% increase in annual incomes to an average $471,000 while most of America saw a steady decline in real take home pay. Oncologists and gastroenterologists did as well. This is especially true in rural parts of the country where there is a chronic shortage of doctors. Competition is anathema to these people.
What broke the health care system in this country is that there was a total absence of cost control, but an unlimited ability to get paid. If you?re having a heart attack, you don?t shop around for the hospital offering the best deal on surgery that week, as we might for a new set of tires (go to Costco) or a new computer.
Being the savvy consumers that we have become, if we don?t like the prices down at the mall we just go online. That?s tough to do with health care.
With insurers or the government picking up the tab whatever the cost, there was no incentive to do so anyway. Doctors excessively ordered tests to protect themselves from lawsuits, thanks to a tort system run amuck.
Drug companies kept inventing new diseases (do any of you male readers suffer from ?low T??). Indulgent lifestyles assured that ever-rising numbers of us got sick, driving prices skyward.
By creating national exchanges selling plain vanilla policies and setting rigorous standards on what they will pay for (?death panels? to opponents), American health care costs are now falling for the first time in history. 2013 saw the first year on year fall on record. This is only the beginning of that $1.6 trillion plunge in costs.
No one really knows what the marginal cost of an MRI scan is. But if you count the capital cost of buying a new $1.4 million machine, deduct the fee the specialist to read the scan, the $60,000 annual salary of the technician to run it, along with maintenance and depreciation, and I bet you get a number a hell of a lot less than $6,000. We are soon going to find out what the marginal cost really is.
This is why opposition to Obamacare has been so violent and vehement five years after it became law. Those who have been feeding off of the gravy train for so long will do anything to protect it. $1.6 trillion buys a lot of lobbyists in Washington DC. <
br /> Most opposing Obamacare in the media are being paid to do so. Ask them exact details about exactly why it is so bad and they either mumble some lame ideological explanation or go mute.
States that support Obamacare and set up their own exchanges, like California, New York, and Kentucky, are seeing dramatic reductions in the cost of health care costs and insurance, up to 50% in some cases. Those that oppose it, such as Texas, are not.
The great irony in all of this is that the states opposing Obamacare need it the most. The 13 states of the old southern Confederacy suffer the worst health in the country.
Take three states out of the national averages, Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama, and the average male life span jumps from 78 to 82. I?m told they eat pure lard down there, not exactly a health food.
So Obamacare is basically a giant federal program that shifts money away from the two coasts toward the South and Midwest, or out of blue states into red ones. This is the same pattern for all large government programs. Why they are against Obamacare one can only imagine, except possibly the name.
I have been pointing out to the administration for years that they have greatly underestimated the long-term impacts of Obamacare on the economy, most of which are positive.
This has led them to unintentionally undersell the program. The impact on the world?s large economy is so enormous that it was impossible to foresee all of the unintended consequences. The only way to find out was to do it.
I?ll give you a couple of examples. Take the ?Obama lied? issue, where the president promised voters they could keep their existing doctors and insurance.
By setting minimal coverage and care standards the government put out of business the ?junk insurance? industry, which provides questionable policies with deductibles of $8,000 or more, low lifetime maximums, and boots you off your coverage as soon as you sneeze.
They had a bad habit of taking in your premium income and disappearing as soon as you made a major claim, with denials at some companies running as high as 50%.
Banning these rip-offs from the industry is all well and good. But nobody knew there were so many such polices, over 5 million. It turns out that no research had been done on this ugly little backwater, as it was purely a private sector enterprise. Then the cancellation letters all went out at once, to the shock and surprise of everyone.
When you are living paycheck to paycheck, about 20% of the country, even $100 a month is too much to spend. Many just don?t like doctors or hospitals and will only sign up after they are seriously ill, probably at the prompting of a social worker. Then they go to the emergency room and don?t pay.
I can tell you from my journalist days that 40% of the population doesn?t read newspapers at all, either the online or hard copy kind. Unless something appears on ESPN or the Golf Channel, they have no clue that it exists. There are those who still can?t operate a computer, as unbelievable as that may seem in the 21st century.
Then there was the website fiasco, the most easily preventable error in the entire rollout. I would bet big money that the former Health and Services Director, Kathleen Sebelius, has never built her own website.
For her, I highly recommend Websites for Dummies (click here for Amazon), which helped me get Mad Hedge Fund Trader off the ground seven years ago.
I was outraged when I heard that the lead contract for the construction of the website was given to a Canadian firm. I raised my hand and said ?Hey, we out here in Silicon Valley know how to build websites too.?
They should have just given the whole thing to Google (GOOG). But that would have raised conflict of interest questions, as founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin were two of Obama?s largest donors.
Corporations will get, thankfully, out of the health care business completely, offloading coverage to Obamacare as fast as they can. Small companies are already doing this in large numbers because workers can get better coverage for less money. This will level the playing field with foreign competitors for the first time in more than half a century, whose own governments cover the health care costs of their employees for free.
Those in the hedge fund, banking and oil industry luxuriating in $30,000 a year formerly tax free Cadillac insurance plans now have to pay ordinary income tax on benefits worth more than $10,000 a year. With most of the tax subsidy gone, there is little reason for employers to continue with these perks.
What is the bottom line for the shareholders in all of this? A substantial reduction in costs that drops straight to the bottom line, creating surging profits and stock prices. That works for me!
All of the above is a major reason why health care has been a major plank in my trading portfolio for the past two years, and may remain so for the next decade.
Followers of my Trade Alert Service cashed in on my long in the Health Care Sector Select SPDR ETF (XLV) and hepatitis drug manufacturer Gilead Sciences (GILD) multiple times. Those who took my advice joyfully watched them run away to the upside.
Expect this to be a recurring theme in my equity coverage. The SPDR S&P Pharmaceutical Index (XPH), Celgene (CELG), Biogen (BIIB), and the SPDR S&P Biotech Index (XBI) are also on the menu and looking tasty.
Every country in the world that has implemented national heath care has been successful. We are the smartest people in the world, so there is no reason we can?t make it work as well, if not better. Only political obstacles stand in the way.
It could well be that the stock markets are the first to see these momentous changes, far ahead of we mere mortals. Such is the wisdom of markets. So far, your investment portfolio agrees.
It will be at least a decade before we can judge the results of Obamacare, it is so vast and complex an undertaking. Up for grabs are individual markets for over 10,000 different treatments and services. It is far too early to call it a failure or a success. In any case, the earliest it can be repealed is 2025, after Hillary Clinton completes her second term as president. So get used to it.
What about my own insurance? I am waiting for my Medicare to kick in, which is only a year off. Until then, they are going to have to come after me with handcuffs and a taser. I bet many other Americans plan on doing the same.
By then, the website should be working and the costs brought in line with reality. Then I?ll buy the cheapest possible policy, the popular ?Bronze? plan, because I never get sick.
Who has time for doctors?
After all, who needs health insurance if they are going to live forever?
They Said This Would Be So Easy
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Mad Day Trader Jim Parker is expecting the first quarter of 2015 to offer plenty of volatility and loads of great trading opportunities. He thinks the scariest moves may already be behind us.
After a ferocious week of decidedly ?RISK OFF? markets, the sweet spots going forward will be of the ?RISK ON? variety. Sector leadership could change daily, with a brutal rotation, depending on whether the price of oil is up, down, or sideways.
The market is paying the price of having pulled forward too much performance from 2015 back into the final month of 2014, when we all watched the December melt up slack jawed.
Jim is a 40-year veteran of the financial markets and has long made a living as an independent trader in the pits at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He worked his way up from a junior floor runner to advisor to some of the world?s largest hedge funds. We are lucky to have him on our team and gain access to his experience, knowledge and expertise.
Jim uses a dozen proprietary short-term technical and momentum indicators to generate buy and sell signals. Below are his specific views for the new quarter according to each asset class.
Stocks
The S&P 500 (SPY) and NASDAQ have met all of Jim?s short-term downside targets, and a sustainable move up from here is in the cards. But if NASDAQ breaks 4,100 to the downside, all bets are off.
His favorite sector is health care (XLV), which seems immune to all troubles, and may have already seen its low for the year. Jim is also enamored with technology stocks (XLK).
The coming year will be a great one for single stock pickers. Priceline (PCLN) is a great short, dragged down by the weak Euro, where they get much of their business. Ford Motors (F) probably bottomed yesterday, and is a good offsetting long.
Bonds
Jim is not inclined to stand in front of a moving train, so he likes the Treasury bond market (TLT), (TBT). He thinks the 30-year yield could reach an eye popping 2.25%. A break there is worth another 10 basis points. Bonds are getting a strong push from a flight to safety, huge US capital inflows, and an endlessly strong dollar.
Foreign Currencies
A short position in the Euro (FXE), (EUO) is the no brainer here. The problem is one of good new entry points. Real traders always have trouble selling into a free fall. But you might see profit taking as we approach $1.16 in the cash market.
The Aussie (FXA) is being dragged down by the commodity collapse and an indifferent government. The British pound (FXB) is has yet to recover from the erosion of confidence ignited by the Scotland independence vote and has further mud splattered upon it by the weak Euro.
Precious Metals
GOLD (GLD) could be in a good range pivoting off of the recent $1,140 bottom. The gold miners (GDX) present the best opportunity at catching some volatility. The barbarous relic is pulling up the price of silver (SLV) as well. Buy the hard breaks, and then take quick profits. In a deflationary world, there is no long-term trade here. It is a real field of broken dreams.
Energy
Jim is not willing to catch a falling knife in the oil space (USO). He has too few fingers as it is. It has become too difficult to trade, as the algorithms are now in charge, and a lot of gap moves take place in the overnight markets. Don?t bother with fundamentals as they are irrelevant. No one really knows where the bottom in oil is.
Agriculturals
Jim is friendly to the ags (CORN), (SOYB), (DBA), but only on sudden pullbacks. However, there are no new immediate signals here. So he is just going to wait. The next directional guidance will come with the big USDA report at the end of January. The ags are further clouded by a murky international picture, with the collapse of the Russian ruble allowing the rogue nation to undercut prices on the international market.
Volatility
Volatility (VIX), (VXX) is probably going to peak out her soon in the $23-$25 range. The next week or so will tell for sure. A lot hangs on Friday?s December nonfarm payroll report. Every trader out there remembers that the last three visits to this level were all great shorts. However, the next bottom will be higher, probably around the $16 handle.
If you are not already getting Jim?s dynamite Mad Day Trader service, please get yourself the unfair advantage you deserve. Just email Nancy in customer support at support@madhedgefundtrader.com and ask for the $1,500 a year upgrade to your existing Global Trading Dispatch service.
Volatility Weekly
Volatility Monthly
Euro to the Dollar
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Some 40 years ago, when I was a biotechnology student at UCLA, a handful of graduate students speculated about how dangerous our work really was. It only took us an hour to figure out how to synthesize a microbe that had a 99% fatality rate, was immune to antibiotics, and was so simple it could be produced in your home kitchen.
Basically, a bunch of bored students discovered a way to destroy the world.
We voiced our concerns to our professors, who immediately convened a national conference of leaders in the field. Science had outpaced regulation, as it always does. They adopted standards and implemented safeguards to keep this genie from getting out of the bottle.
Four decades later scientists have been successful at preventing a ?doomsday? bug from accidently escaping a lab and wiping out the world?s population.
That is, until now.
In 2010, Dr. Craig Venter created the first completely synthetic life form able to reproduce on its own. Named ?Phi X 174,? the simple virus was produced from a string of DNA composed entirely on a computer. Thus was invented the field of synthetic biology, better known as ?SynBio.?
Venter?s homemade creature was your basic entry level organism. Its DNA was composed of only 1 million base pairs of nucleic acids (adenine, thymine, cytosine, guanine, and uracil), compared to the 3 billion pairs in a human genome. Shortly thereafter, Venter one-upped himself by manufacturing the world?s first synthetic bacteria.
The work was hailed as the beginning of a brave new world that will enable biology to make the same dramatic advances in technology that computer science did in the 20th century. Dr. Drew Endy of Stanford University says that SynBio already accounts for 2% of US GDP, and is growing at a breakneck 12% per year. He predicts that SynBio will eventually do more for the economy than the Internet and social media combined.
You may recall Craig Venter as the man who first decoded the human genome in 2003. The effort demanded the labor of thousands of scientists and cost $3 billion. We later learned that the DNA that was decoded was Craig?s own. Some five years later, the late Steve Jobs spent $1 million to decode his own genes in a vain attempt to find a cure for pancreatic cancer.
Today, you can get the job done for $1,000 in less than 24 hours. That?s what movie star Angelina Jolie did, who endured a voluntary double mastectomy when she learned her genes guaranteed a future case of terminal breast cancer.
The decoding industry is now moving to low cost China, where giant warehouses have been built to decode the DNA of a substantial part of humanity. That should soon drop the price to $100. It?s all about full automation and economies of scale.
This technology is already spreading far faster than most realize. In 2004, MIT started the International Genetically Engineered Machine Contest where college students competed to construct new life forms. Recently, a high school division was opened, attracting 194 entries from kids in 34 countries. Gee, when I went to wood shop in high school it was a big deal when I finished my table lamp.
This will make possible ?big data? approaches to medical research that will lead to cures of every major human disease, such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and more, within our lifetimes. This is why the health care (XLV), biotechnology (XBI), and pharmaceutical (XPH) sectors have been top performers in the stock market for the past two years. It?s not just about Obamacare.
The implications spread far beyond health care. IBM (IBM) is experimenting with using DNA based computer code to replace the present simple, but hugely inefficient, binary system of 0?s and 1?s. ?DNA based computation? is prompting computer scientists to become biochemists and biochemists to evolve into computer scientists to create ?living circuit boards.? Google (GOOG), Apple (AAPL), and Cisco (CSCO) have all taken notice.
We are probably only a couple years away from enterprising hobbyists downloading DNA sequences from the Internet and building new bugs at home with a 3D printer. Simple organisms, like viruses, would need a file size no larger than one needed for a high definition photo taken with your iPhone. They can then download other genes from the net, creating their own customized microbes at will.
This is all great news for investors of every stripe, and will no doubt accelerate America?s economic growth. But it is also causing governments and scientists around the world to wring their hands, seeing the opening of a potential Pandora?s Box. What if other scientists lack Venter?s ethics, who went straight to President Obama for a security clearance before he made his findings public?
If we can?t trust our kids to drink, drive, or vote, then how responsibly will they behave when they get their hands on potential bioterror weapons? How many are familiar with Bio Safety Level 4 (BSL) standards? None, I hope.
In fact, the race is already on to weaponize SynBio. In 2002, scientists at SUNY Stonybrook synthesized a polio virus for the first time. In 2005, another group managed to recreate the notorious H1N1 virus that caused the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic. Some 50-100 million died in that pandemic within 2 years.
Then in 2011, Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Center in Holland announced that he had found a way to convert the H5N1 bird flu virus, which in nature is only transmitted from birds to people, into a human to human virus. Of the 565 who have come down with bird flu so far, which originates in China, 59% have died.
It didn?t take long for the Chinese to get involved. They have taken Fouchier?s work several steps further, creating over 127 H5N1 flu varieties, five of which can be transmitted through the air, such as from a sneeze. The attributes of one of these just showed up in the latest natural strain of bird flu, the H7N9.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia are charged with protecting us from outbreaks like this. But getting the WHO, a giant global bureaucracy, to agree on anything is almost impossible, unless there is already a major outbreak underway. The CDC has seen its budget cut by 25% since 2010, and has lost another 5% due to the US government sequester.
The problem is that the international organizations charged with monitoring all of this are still stuck in the Stone Age. Current regulations revolve around known pathogens, like smallpox and the Ebola virus, that date back to the 1960?s, when the concern was about moving lethal pathogens across borders via test tubes.
That is, oh so 20th century. Thanks to the Internet, controlling information flow is impossible. Just ask Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad. Al Qaida has used messages embedded in online porn to send orders to terrorists.
Getting international cooperation isn?t that easy. Only 35 countries are currently complying with the safety, surveillance, and research standards laid out by the WHO. Indonesia refused to part with H5N1 virus samples spreading there because it did want to make rich the western pharmaceutical companies that would develop a vaccine. African countries say they are too poor to participate, even though they are the most likely victims of future epidemics.
Scientists have proposed a number of safeguards to keep these new superbugs under control. One would be a dedicated sequence of nucleic acid base pairs inserted into the genes that would indentify its origin, much like a bar code at the supermarket. This is already being used by Monsanto (MON) with its genetically modified seeds. Another would be a ?suicide sequence? that would cause the germ to self-destruct if it ever got out of a lab.
One can expect the National Security Agency to get involved, if they haven?t done so already. If they can screen our phone calls for meta data, why not high risk DNA sequences sent by email?
But this assumes that the creators want to be found. The bioweapons labs of some countries are thought to be creating new pathogens so they can stockpile vaccines and antigens in advance of any future conflict.
There are also the real terrorists to consider. When the Mubarak regime in Egypt was overthrown in 2011, demonstrators sacked the country?s public health labs that had been storing H5N1 virus. Egypt has one of the world?s worst bird flu problems, due to the population?s widespread contact with chickens.
It is hoped that the looters were only in search of valuable electronics they could resell, and tossed the problem test tubes. But that is only just a hope.
I have done a lot of research on this area over the decades. I even chased down the infamous Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army that parachuted plagued infected rats into China during WWII, after first experimenting on American POW?s.
The answer to the probability of bio warfare always comes back the same. Countries never use this last resort for fear of it coming back on the own populations. It really is an Armageddon weapon. Only a nut case would want to try it.
Back in 1976 I was one of the fortunate few to see in person the last living cases of smallpox. As I walked through a 15th century village high in the Himalayas in Nepal, two dozen smiling children leaned out of second story windows to wave at me. The face of every one was covered with bleeding sores. And these were the survivors. Believe me, you don?t want to catch it yourself.
For those who want to learn more about SynBio, or participate in the discussion, please visit the BioBricks Foundation by clicking the link: http://biobricks.org .
Sure, I know this doesn?t directly relate to what the stock market is going to do today. But if a virus escaped from a rogue lab and killed everyone on the planet, that would be bad for prices, wouldn?t it?
I really hope one of the kids competing in the MIT contest doesn?t suffer from the same sort of mental problems as the boy in Newton, Connecticut did.
I Think Wood Shop Would Have Been Easier
Cause of the Next Bear Market, or the End of the World?
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Phi-X-174-Synthetic-Bacteria.jpg374408Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2014-04-01 01:03:472014-04-01 01:03:47Will SynBio Save or Destroy the World?
Still basking in the glow of 2013?s spectacular 26% gain in the Dow, I sat down on a rock on a high mountain the other day to try and figure out what happened.
The last time I saw a move this healthy was back in the nineties, when a perfect trifecta of the internet going mainstream, cheap graphical user interface enabled personal computers, and an easy to use World Wide Web conspired to create a Dotcom boom and send risk assets everywhere ballistic.
Sure, the advent of cheap domestic energy unleashed by the fracking and horizontal drilling of natural gas is a game changer. But that isn?t enough to suddenly convert every investor from a pessimist to an optimist, a Cassandra to a Pollyanna, or a bear to a bull. So what else is helping to send stocks ever Northward?
Fortunately, I brought along an abacus with me to my high altitude retreat. So I ran a few numbers. Approximately 18% of US GDP is derived from the health care industry in some form or another. In Europe they spend only 8%, live longer, and certainly eat better food (I spent two months field testing it last summer).
So what happens when America?s Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, brings our spending down to European levels? The savings would amount to 10% of GDP, or $1.6 trillion. That is a handsome amount of change.
Where would all of this money go? The short answer is: to you and me. To be precise, I get half, and you get half, which works out to $800 billion for each of us, per year.
The reality is a little more complicated than that. We are not going to get our new found wealth in unmarked bills stuffed in a duffle bag left at a dead drop in the middle of the night. Rather, the payoff will come in an indirect form. We will get better quality health care for less money, and more of us will get it, some 48 million to be precise. Oh, and we get to live longer too.
What are we going to do with this windfall? Buy stocks, and lots of them. At least that?s what the stock market thinks. Hence, last year?s ballistic move in equities. This year could be just as good.
If fact, we will be buying a lot of everything, which is why the auto industry is on fire, real estate is recovering, yet the bond market hasn?t crashed. This amount of money hitting the financial system over the coming decade could well be the appetizer to an investment ?golden age? during the 2020?s.
This is fabulous news for asset owners of all stripes, and pretty good for everyone else as well. Companies with rising share prices are much more likely to hire and expand capital investment than those with falling ones, raising standards of living.
The way this happens is what makes Obamacare so interesting, unlike the purely government sponsored plans now in operation in Europe and Asia. It does this with a heavy reliance on the private sector to unleash free market capitalism on the health care industry for the first time in its history.
At last, they will be thrown into the merciless pit of dog eat dog, cutthroat competition where the rest of us have already been living for quite some time. They will be the losers, and we will be the winners.
I have been studying health care for about 40 years now. I was once destined to become a medical researcher at the Center for Disease in Atlanta. But the Defense Department found out I was pretty good with numbers, and I found myself in a bleak part of Northern Nevada now known as Area 51.
When improving relations with the Soviet Union wound things down there and all the aliens went home, there was nowhere else for me to go but the stock market. Suffice it to say, I still know which end of a test tube to hold up.
Health care is the last 19th century industry that operates in this country (except possibly for coal mining). It is fragmented into local monopolies spread amongst the country?s 3,141 counties.
I haven?t had health insurance myself for seven years. After paying on a Blue Cross of California policy for 20 years, they suddenly cancelled my policy claiming an alleged pre existing condition. My real pre existing condition was that I was a 55-year-old white male.
Since I was paying out of pocket for every trip to the doctor, I became an expert on what things cost. The first thing that I learned is that no one in a doctor?s office knows what anything costs. They deliberately don?t know. That way they can feign innocence when you get hit with a whopping big bill.
It was only with the greatest persistence that I was able to chase down the actual dollar cost of tests and procedures. Needless to say, my health care providers considered me a nut case and a pain in the ass. Some refused me care.
This is the land of the $100 plastic hypodermic needle, the $300 paper gown, and the $1,000 saline drip (it?s salt water). MRI Scans can cost $6,000, or $1,500 at the hospital down the street. In fact, I?ve had friends show up for procedures at hospitals with a $3 gown they bought on Ebay, but were still forced to use the identical $300 version.
This is why the wealthiest guy in the county is often the one who runs the local hospital, or sells specialized prescribed treatments and procedures. From 1995 to 2012, dermatologists saw a 50% increase in annual incomes to an average $471,000 while most of America saw a steady decline in real take home pay. Oncologists and gastroenterologists did as well. This is especially true in rural parts of the country where there is a chronic shortage of doctors. Competition is anathema to these people.
What broke the health care system in this country is that there was a total absence of cost control, but an unlimited ability to get paid. If you?re having a heart attack, you don?t shop around for the hospital offering the best deal on surgery that week, as we might for a new set of tires or a new computer. Being the savvy consumers that we have become, if we don?t like the prices down at the mall we just go online. That?s tough to do with health care.
With insurers or the government picking up the tab whatever the cost, there was no incentive to do so anyway. Doctors excessively ordered tests to protect themselves from lawsuits, thanks to a tort system run amuck. Drug companies kept inventing new diseases (do any of you male readers suffer from ?low T??). Indulgent lifestyles assured that ever rising numbers of us got sick, driving prices skyward.
By creating national exchanges selling plain vanilla policies and setting rigorous standards on what they will pay for (?death panels? to opponents), American health care costs are now falling for the first time in history. 2013 saw the first year on year fall on record. This is only the beginning of that $1.6 trillion plunge in costs.
No one really knows what the marginal cost of an MRI scan is. But if you count the capital cost of buying a new $1.4 million machine, deduct the fee the specialist to read the scan, the $60,000 annual salary of the technician to run it, along with maintenance and depreciation, and I bet you get a number a hell of a lot less than $6,000. We are soon going to find out what the marginal cost really is.
This is why opposition to Obamacare has been so violent and vehement four years after it became law. Those who have been feeding off of the gravy train for so long will do anything to protect it. $1.6 trillion buys a lot of lobbyists in Washington DC. Most opposing Obamacare in the media are being paid to do so. Ask them exact details about exactly why it is so bad and they either mumble some lame ideological explanation or go mute.
States that support Obamacare and set up their own exchanges, like California, New York, and Kentucky, are seeing dramatic reductions in the cost of health care costs and insurance, up to 50% in some cases. Those that oppose it, such as Texas, are not.
The great irony in all of this is that the states opposing Obamacare need it the most. The 13 states of the old southern Confederacy suffer the worst health in the country. Take three states out of the national averages, Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama, and the average male life span jumps from 78 to 82. I?m told they eat pure lard down there, not exactly a health food.
So Obamacare is basically a giant federal program that shifts money away from the two coasts toward the South and Midwest, or out of blue states into red ones. This is the same pattern for all large government programs. Why they are against Obamacare one can only imagine, except possibly the name.
I have been pointing out to the administration for years that they have greatly underestimated the long-term impacts of Obamacare on the economy, most of which are positive. This has led them to unintentionally undersell the program. The impact of the world?s large economy is so enormous that it was impossible to foresee all of the unintended consequences. The only way to find out was to do it.
I?ll give you a couple of examples. Take the ?Obama lied? issue, where the president promised voters they could keep their existing doctors and insurance. By setting minimal coverage and care standards the government put out of business the ?junk insurance? industry, which provides questionable policies with deductibles of $8,000 or more, low lifetime maximums, and boot you off your coverage as soon as you sneeze. They had a bad habit of taking in your premium income and disappearing as soon as you made a major claim, with denials at some companies running as high as 50%.
Banning these rip-offs from the industry is all well and good. But nobody knew there were so many such polices, over 5 million. It turns out that no research had been done on this ugly little backwater, as it was purely a private sector enterprise. Then the cancellation letters all went out at once, to the shock and surprise of everyone.
There is the fact that so few have signed up for the free and subsidized coverage. When you are living paycheck to paycheck, about 20% of the country, even $100 a month is too much to spend. Many just don?t like doctors or hospitals and will only sign up after they are seriously ill, probably at the prompting of a social worker.
I can tell you from my journalist days that 40% of the population doesn?t read newspapers at all, either the online or hard copy kind. Unless something appears on ESPN or the Golf Channel, they have no clue that it exists. There are those who still can?t operate a computer, as unbelievable as that may seem in the 21st century.
Then there is the website fiasco, the most easily preventable error in the entire rollout. I would bet big money that Health and Services Director, Kathleen Sebelius, has never built her own website. For her, I highly recommend Building a web Site for Dummies (click here for Amazon), which helped me get Mad Hedge Fund Trader off the ground seven years ago.
I was outraged when I heard that the lead contract for the construction of the website was given to a Canadian firm. I raised my hand and said ?Hey, we out here in Silicon Valley know how to build websites too.? They should have just given the whole thing to Google (GOOG). But that would have raised conflict of interest questions, as founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin were two of Obama?s largest donors.
Corporations will get, thankfully, out of the health care business completely, offloading coverage to Obamacare as fast as they can. Small companies are already doing this in large numbers because workers can get better coverage for less money. This will level the playing field with foreign competitors for the first time in more than half a century, whose own governments cover the health care costs of their employees for free.
Those in the hedge fund, banking, and oil industry luxuriating in $30,000 a year formerly tax free Cadillac insurance plans now have to pay ordinary income tax on benefits worth more than $10,000 a year. With most of the tax subsidy gone, there is little reason for employers to continue with these perks.
What is the bottom line for the shareholders in all of this? A substantial reduction in costs that drops straight to the bottom line, creating surging profits and stock prices.
All of the above is a major reason why health care has been a major plank in my trading portfolio for the past six months, and may remain so for the next decade. Followers of my Trade Alert Service cashed in on my long in the Health Care Sector Select SPDR ETF (XLV).
Those who took my advice to buy hepatitis drug manufacturer Gilead Sciences (GILD) joyfully watched it run away to the upside. Expect this to be a recurring theme in my equity coverage. (XLS), (XPH), and (XBI) are on the menu and looking tasty.
Every country in the world that has implemented national heath care has been successful. We are the smartest people in the world, so there is no reason we can?t make it work as well, if not better. Only political obstacles stand in the way.
It could well be that the stock markets are the first to see these momentous changes, far ahead of we mere mortals. Such is the wisdom of markets. So far, your investment portfolio agrees.
It will be at least a decade before we can judge the results of Obamacare, it is so vast and complex an undertaking. Up for grabs are individual markets for over 10,000 different treatments and services. It is far too early to call it a failure or a success. In any case, the earliest it can be repealed is 2025, after Hillary Clinton completes her second term as president. So get used to it.
What about my own insurance? I am going to wait until the last possible moment to sign up for Obamacare, when they are about to come for me with handcuffs and a taser. I bet many other Americans plan on doing the same.
By then, the website should be working and the costs brought in line with reality. Then I?ll buy the cheapest possible policy, the popular ?Bronze? plan.
After all, who needs health insurance if they are going to live forever?
They Said This Would Be So Easy
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Obama.jpg312472Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2014-01-21 09:18:382014-01-21 09:18:38How Obamacare Will Boost Your Portfolio
Not a day, an hour, or a minute goes by without the media blasting at me about how terrible Obamacare is. I wondered, how terrible can it be? There?s got to be a trade in there somewhere.
After intensively researching several industries I concluded that the investment opportunities created by the president?s signature legislative accomplishment are absolutely massive. The health care industry is about to get 30 million new customers with government guaranteed payments. Ten?s of millions more are being driven into the arms of the private health insurers as well. It?s almost the same gravy train that the defense industry has been living off of for the past 75 years.
The stock market has been screaming as much at us all year. Take a look at the Health Care Select Sector SPDR ETF (XLV), which has been rocketing for the past three years. Its ascent accelerated on October 1, when Obamacare officially kicked in.
You will also find the same windfall is showering upon the health insurance industry. The shares of the second largest company in the country, WellPoint (WLP) have soared by 68% this year, while the fourth biggest (AET) is up an impressive 40%.
The speeches claiming that Obamacare is a failure were written in September, before the program ever started. Not, September, 2013, but September, 1936, when Republicans fought tooth and nail against Social Security. The speeches are almost identical, word for word. I?m not kidding!
In fact, insurance exchanges are one of the oldest forms of commerce, dating back to London in the 1600?s. Lloyds of London has been around since 1871, and makes a profit in most years.
It will take Obamacare a decade to become fully operational and actuarially sound. After that it should cost the government almost nothing, just a few hundred million dollars a year for administration of the exchanges. Americans are the smartest people in the world, so there is no reason for this not to work, except political ones. In fact, ours should be better than those in Europe and Asia.
The political obstacles will fade as well. Hillary Clinton is the overwhelming front-runner for the 2016 presidential election. If elected, the earliest Republicans could repeal Obamacare would be 2025. There will probably be a liberal majority on the Supreme Court by then as well. With a 12-year track record, it is unlikely that any political party will try to repeal government-sponsored health insurance at that stage.
The stock market is also telling you that Obamacare is here to stay. Believe in the wisdom of crowds. They are usually right.
This is why the shares of entire health care and insurance industries are melting up now. This is why I want to buy into the industry now.
The easiest way to participate is through Health Care Select Sector SPDR (XLV), a basket of companies in the health care industry with a 1.71% dividend yield. Please note that a basket of stocks is going to deliver half the volatility of single stocks.
Therefore, we have to be more aggressive with the positioning to make any money, picking strikes that are closer to the money. Johnson and Johnson (JJ) is the largest holding in this fund, with a 12.8% weighting, while Gilead Sciences (GILD) is the fourth, with a 5.1% share. For a list of the largest components of this ETF, please click here https://www.spdrs.com/product/fund.seam?ticker=XLV .
As soon as the current correction ends, I?ll shoot out a Trade Alert to you as fast as the speed of light.
Health Care Select Sector SPDR ETF (XLV)
I Think I Hear a Trading Opportunity
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Doctor-Girl.jpg301452Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2013-11-21 11:49:382013-11-21 11:49:38Cashing In On Obamacare
So much BS is flying about over the Obamacare issue that I can?t resist the temptation to put in my two cents worth.
There was no chance this was going to work on day one, and I warned senior administration officials as much on many different occasions. Even the Massachusetts health care plan only saw 100 sign ups in the first month, and it was supported by both parties.
The fatal flaw? They believed the website developer, which anyone who runs on online business, such as myself, will tell you, is a great way to ruin your life.
The truly shocking revelation is that the lead development contract was handed out to a Canadian company. Hey, we out here in Silicon Valley have web development companies! One wonders why the government didn?t hand the whole project over to Google.
While the administration has applauded the millions who rushed to sign up in the early days, I believe that the headline we will see in six months or a year is that almost of them were already sick and uninsured, with diabetes, hypertension, or even cancer. Why the rush?
The government is essentially attempting to create 50 Amazon?s overnight with the many state insurance exchanges. It took Amazon, itself, 20 years to create just one Amazon, and that?s with my old friend, the brilliant Jeff Bezos, calling the shots and taking huge risks.
Having worked with the US military for 40 years, I can tell you that the government never throws anything away, not old tanks, old fighters, old weapons, and yes, old software. I can?t tell you how many times I jumped into a Navy or Marine cockpit, looked at the instrument panel, and said to myself ?You?ve got to be kidding. This thing belongs in a museum.?
For example, the B-52 Stratofortress intercontinental bomber, which was first designed in 1946 and built in 1952, is not scheduled for retirement until 2050, when it will be nearly 100 years old. Thank goodness for preventative maintenance!
So it is no surprise then to hear that the root of Obamacare?s software problems lies with its inter platform communication. ?Some of the software is brand new, some is 10 years old, and some 20 years old, and custom written by programmers who are probably dead by now. But it all has to talk to each other to function. Good luck with that!
Health care accounts for 12% of our GDP, or about $2 trillion, and employs about 18 million people. That amount of money generates gargantuan fees for lobbyists to maintain the gravy train for the private companies who run the system. This is an industry that has been sheltered from competition until now, which is why costs have been running away for 30 years.
As a result, virtually all information about Obamacare disseminated by the media is inaccurate.? You see kids being interviewed on the street asked how much more they will have to spend on Obamacare compared to no coverage at all, and the figure comes to about $2,500 a year.
This is for kids who make $30,000-$40,000 a year. It is a big hit to be sure. But no one asks what will happen if they get hit by a car, or fall off their skateboards. That?s because there is only one answer: go to county hospital, and then file for bankruptcy. Still, most will end up paying the first year fine, which is $85.
This week?s talking point, manufactured by political consultants working in ill lit rooms for unknown companies funded by anonymous donors, is about the millions of cancellation letters that have been sent out by insurance companies individual alarmed private policyholders. I have read a few of these letters.
It turns out that the insured in question had bargain basement policies that really didn?t cover them for anything. They don?t find this out until they try to make a claim, which then gets denied. By setting new, higher standards to fit in the round holes of the public exchanges, the government is forcing the providers to raise the quality of care or quit the business, which they are doing in droves. Somehow, Obama was supposed to know they were going to do this when the law was written five years ago.
The policyholders don?t know this because they have never read their own policies, and are unaware of what the government plan offers. They are having to comparative shop for health care for the first time in their lives, and they don?t like it. Most just paid up for the annual price increases without question.
The alternative, of course, is to then go out and get an Obamacare policy, which offers more care at a cheaper price than these cancelled policies. Yes, it is true that polices in rural constituencies may cost more. But that?s as it should be. It always costs more to provide service in the middle of nowhere than it a city.
There has been a lot of hand wringing about the higher cost of Obamacare policies. Everyone I have talked to here in California is seeing a savings of about 50%. A part time schoolteacher friend of mine was just given notice that her Blue Cross policy was doubling from $200 to $400 a month. She then went to https://www.healthcare.gov and got a better, more comprehensive policy for $220 a month.
Finally, I have had no insurance for six years. I loyally paid $500 a month into Blue Cross for one of their high-end policies for 20 years. When I shifted coverage from one of my companies to another to get a tax benefit, I was told I had to file as a new applicant. What was my new rate? $3,500 a month. So I asked to restore my old coverage. Blue Cross said no, because I had pre existing conditions. What was my pre existing condition? I was then a 55-year-old white male.
So I called around to find out what my health care actually cost. A broken leg ran $50,000, while a heart attack was $250,000. But if I paid cash, they would cut the bill by half. So I told Blue Cross to get lost. My total health care costs have run about $500 a year since then, mostly for bandaging my sore feet from 50 miles a week of mountainous backpacking and an annual commercial pilot?s physical. I reckon that I am one heart attack ahead of the game by now.
Now Obamacare is requiring me to get health insurance once again. If I don?t sign up, the fine is 1% of my gross income in the first year, and 2.5% in the second. Oops! Don?t want to go there! I?d end up buying the government a new hospital every year. So I signed up for Obamacare. Their lowest level ?Bronze? plan will cost me $235 a month. That I can handle.
The Affordable Health Care Act will probably bring more positive changes to the US economy since the slaves were freed in 1863. As with Thomas Edison?s introduction of electricity, Steve Job?s personal computer, and Tim Berners-Lee?s World Wide Web, its impact will be so broad that it is impossible to predict the ultimate impact.
For sure, it will allow US companies to get out of the health care business once and for all, which has left them at a globally competitive disadvantage for decades. This is why Fortune 500 CEO?s have been conspicuously mum on the issue.
You can bet that the next time your firm has a bad quarter, they will cancel your Cadillac plan to cut costs, boost profits, give you the https://www.healthcare.gov website address, and say ?Good Luck? (click here to see if you can open it. You should).
In any case, the premiums on company provided plans costing more than $10,000 a year are now taxable as ordinary income. I know from my own experience that investment bank and oil major plans cost over $25,000. So goodbye to another tax free benefit.
There will be other momentous changes. Innovation and streamlining of the health care industry is accelerating at an exponential pace as companies, spurred on by competition for the first time, rise to the challenge. We, as the consumers will only benefit, with lower costs for a higher quality product.
The new plan will create 2 million new jobs, and add 0.5% a year to US GDP growth. That assumes that the same number of people are used to provide care that we currently see, or one health care provider for every 15 people.
The great misperception about Obamacare is that it is government provided health care. It has not taken over the hospitals and required doctors to go to work for it, as has been the case in Europe. The government is only facilitating the exchanges, much as it has already done for the stock and commodity exchanges through the SEC and the CFTC, and then paying for the poorest participants.
If you took the name ?Obama? out of Obamacare, you would think that it was a program designed by the Republican Party. Free market capitalism, competition, and open exchanges are supposed to be what they are all about. Obama is only giving them what they have been asking for during the last 30 years, and was already implemented by a Republican governor in Massachusetts, Mitt Romney. Maybe if it were called Obamacare on the coasts, and ?Tea Party Care? or ?Cruz Care? in the Midwest and in Texas it would be less controversial.
Every industrialized country already has national health care. They have been able to limit the growth of health care?s share of their economy to only 8% of GDP, compared to our 12%, but enjoy life spans 5-10 years longer. They had the wisdom to do it when it was cheap in the late 1940?s and early 1950?s.
Unfortunately, the US suffered from fears of a communist takeover then and was undergoing the McCarthy hearings, so there was no chance of adopting socialized medicine. We are supposed to be the smartest people in the world, so we have a better shot at making this work than anyone.
There is a huge investment story here. The health care industry is about to get 30-40 million more customers with government guaranteed payments. This is one of the best free lunches granted to any industry in decades and will be great for business. This is why I have been recommending the Health Care Select SPDR ETF (XLV) since the summer, recently one of the market?s top performing sectors.
Anyone who knows anything about the mathematics of insurance exchanges, such as Lloyds of London, already knows that Obamacare is going to work. Yes, it is possible to insure more people for less cost with the per capita burden carried by a greater number of people. This is why insurance is one of the oldest forms of commerce, originating in London in the mid 17th century, back when they still had to deal with the black plague.
Competition should reign in health care costs. As it matures in a decade or so, Obamacare will become actuarially sound and cost the government nothing. The payoff will be lower overheads and higher profits for US corporations. This is probably what the stock market is trying to tell us by going up almost every day. Since the Obamacare launch on October 1, stock S&P 500 (SPY) has tacked on an astonishing 5.5%, in what is historically a terrible month for stocks.
Obamacare distills down individual policies to plain vanilla securities, which can be traded like stocks, sucking in capital at market prices, much like the derivatives markets do today. You can bet that Wall Street will soon get in on the act as well. They will rapidly introduce hedging strategies, customized securitizations, and even ETF?s, so risks can be laid off here and abroad, creating new profit streams. In a decade the health insurance markets will become unrecognizable and far more efficient than they are today.
I don?t side with either party on this issue. A pox on both their houses. I?m on my side first, then your side, as a paying reader. Hence, this analysis. Overall, the plan is brilliant.
In fact, I wish I had thought of it first.
Bitch all you want about Obamacare, but it?s here to stay. In the meantime, I?m going to make hay why the sun shines, and stay healthy.
Is There a Connection With Obamacare?
More Than Meets the Eye
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Obamacare-site.jpg374566Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2013-10-31 09:05:342013-10-31 09:05:34My Take on Obamacare
If it hasn?t happened by today, then it is no more than a week away. The deep discount suffered by American stocks is about to go away. Thanks to the manufactured uncertainty emanating from the nation?s capital created by the government shutdown, stocks have been selling at a 10% or more discount to where they should be.
As things stand, the shutdown is chopping about 1/8% a week from America?s GDP growth. If it runs for another week, it will add up to a 0.25%. What economists haven?t considered in these figures is the additional 0.25% loss that will come from a restart of the government. People are so afraid of the shocking cessation of many government services that they are cleaning out ATM?s, forcing the banks to maintain higher than normal cash levels.
The 2013 Federal budget provides for $3.8 trillion in government spending out of a $16.5 trillion GDP, some 23%. I tried to get more precise figures by clicking the link for the Department of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis website (http://www.bea.gov/index.htm ), and was greeted by the closest thing you can imagine for a middle fingered salute. You just don?t snap your fingers and expect a quarter of the economy to sprint out of the blocks.
There is another cost to consider. All government statistics have been rendered meaningless for the rest of the year. Even if the government restarts tomorrow, aberrations in the data will plague us well into next year, making economic forecasts more difficult and less meaningful than usual. This is when the moving averages for data series will really earn their pay.
My political theory for the past three years has been that the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party will act unimaginably stupid, dragging governance to new lows, wreaking the maximum amount of damage possible. They feel that if they can?t own the government, they must break it.
Gerrymandering means they can?t be dislodged by elections. These people are being cheered by supporters for their appalling behavior back home in the heartland of America. This will ultimately lead to the destruction of the Republican Party, and is why President Obama is quite happy to sit on his hands and do nothing. Why interfere when your opponent is committing suicide?
So far I have been right on the money. An accurate political read has been a major element in delivering my 100% gain since the end of 2010, no matter how unpopular it may be.
This analysis has the government shutdown lasting until October 17, little more than a week from today, and vastly longer than expected. That?s the day the government shutdown rolls into the debt ceiling crisis. With far more cataclysmic consequences at stake, this crisis has a greater likelihood of getting solved.
This is all spectacular news for investors, who have recently been boning up on their history. The 17 government shutdowns since 1975 have averaged six days. After each one, stock rose by an average 7.8% in the following six months, and by 13.2% over the following year. We could be in for similar returns in this round. ?It looks like its going to be off to the races once again, and my yearend target of 1,780 for the (SPY) is looking good.
The 0.5% in growth we are losing this quarter will get rolled into the next. Q1, 2014 was already setting up to be hot, thanks to a global synchronized recovery in the US, Europe, Japan, China, and even Australia. Some 60% of world GDP is now enjoying unprecedented easy money. This concentration of more growth into the next quarter could take the US GDP figure as high as an annualized 3.5%.
Portfolio managers have already figured this out, which is why they are relentlessly buying every dip, and explains the modest 3.5% drop in the S&P 500 we have seen since the shutdown began. Providing additional rocket fuel is the fact that many firms are under the gun to get new money into the market by the end of the year.
There is one certainty here. The shutdown firmly takes a taper by the Federal Reserve off the table for 2013. It turns out that Ben Bernanke correctly read that the Tea Party would drive the economy off a cliff, and that the safety net of continued monetary stimulus was needed. Nice call, Ben! This will give the bulls the fodder they need to take stock prices up all the way until next spring, when we may finally get a real taper.
I would be using the down days from here on to scale into the hottest sectors of the market, especially the 2X leveraged ETF?s. You can do this with consumer discretionary stocks with the (XLY), (UCC), industrials with (XLI), (UXI), technology with (XLK), (ROM), and with health care through the (XLV), (RXL).
This is what I really want to know. Last Sunday, the hit TV drug show, Breaking Bad, saw its series finale. The cult terrorism drama, Homeland, delivered its third season opener at the same time. The next day, the government closed.
Do you think there is a connection?
Is There a Connection?
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/National-Parks-Closed.jpg357541Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2013-10-07 01:04:392013-10-07 01:04:39Say Goodbye to the Washington Discount
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Looks Like a ?BUY? To Me
