Global Market Comments
February 6, 2014
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(THURSDAY FEBRUARY 20 MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA STRATEGY LUNCH)
(MAD HEDGE FUND TRADER SURGES AHEAD WITH A 5.78%),
(TLT), (UNG), (AAPL)
(DINNER WITH ELIOT SPITZER)
iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond (TLT)
United States Natural Gas (UNG)
Apple Inc. (AAPL)
The red hot performance of the Mad Hedge Fund Trader?s Trade Alert Service has maintained its blistering pace from last year, picking up another 6.49% profit in the first two trading weeks of 2014.
The Dow Average was down 6.2% during the same period pegging my outperformance of the index at a stunning 12.7%. Since the beginning of 2013, I am up 77%. 2013 closed with a total return for followers of 67.45%.
The three-year return is now an eye popping 132%, compared to a far more modest increase for the Dow Average during the same period of only 26%. That brings my averaged annualized return up to 41.7%.
This has been the profit since my groundbreaking trade mentoring service was launched in 2010. It all is a matter of the harder I work, the luckier I get.
The hot streak continues.
The smartest thing I did in the past year was to let all of my options expire on January 15, and then moved to an 80% cash position. That spared me the angst, the soul searching, and the sleepless night caused by the 10% correction that followed in the Dow Average.
This set me up to cherry pick the most extreme market moves. But this time was different. Instead of returning to call spreads, I adopted an outright put option strategy.
This allowed me to pick up highly leveraged short positions in Treasury bonds and natural gas, while risking only 5% of my capital with each. Don?t people know that polar vortexes only come in pairs? I guess no one studies physics anymore. When the markets broke, a sharp rise in volatility also contributed to the P&L.
To top it all, Steve Jobs chipped in again, even though he has been dead for 2 ? years. My call spread in Apple shares PROFITABLY came home once more.
My esteemed colleague, Mad Day Trader Jim Parker, had no small part of this success. Since the market became technically and momentum driven, I have been confirming with him before sending out every Trade Alert. Together, out success rate is 100%.
What would you expect with a combined 85 years of market experience between the two of us? Followers are laughing all the way to the bank.
Don?t forget that Jim clocked an amazing 2013 staggering 374%. That is just for an eight-month year!
The coming year promises to deliver a harvest of new trading opportunities. The big driver will be a global synchronized recovery that promises to drive markets into the stratosphere in 2014.
The Trade Alerts should be coming hot and heavy. Please join me on the gravy train. You will never get a better chance than this to make money for your personal account.
Global Trading Dispatch, my highly innovative and successful trade-mentoring program, earned a net return for readers of 40.17% in 2011, 14.87% in 2012, and 67.45% in 2013.
The service includes my Trade Alert Service and my daily newsletter, the Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader. You also get a real-time trading portfolio, an enormous trading idea database, and live biweekly strategy webinars. ?Upgrade to?Mad Hedge Fund Trader PRO?and you will also receive Jim Parker?s?Mad Day Trader?service.
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Global Market Comments
February 5, 2014
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(FRIDAY FEBRUARY 14 SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA STRATEGY LUNCH),
(THREE CHARTS THAT WILL TURN THE MARKETS),
(TLT), (TBT), (FXY), (YCS), (SPX), (BAC), (C), (GLD),
(GRAPES OF WRATH REDUX),
(TESTIMONIAL)
iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond (TLT)
ProShares UltraShort 20+ Year Treasury (TBT)
CurrencyShares Japanese Yen Trust (FXY)
ProShares UltraShort Yen (YCS)
S&P 500 Index (SPX)
Bank of America Corporation (BAC)
Citigroup Inc. (C)
SPDR Gold Shares (GLD)
I wrote at length yesterday about why this is not a new bear market, but a traditional 7%-10% correction instead. Now, I?ll show you three charts that will call the exact turnaround.
The ten-year Treasury bond (TLT), (TBT) is clearly the lead contract. It has, far and away, been the most accurate in anticipating the future direction of all asset classes. Get this one right, and everything else falls into line.
Take a look at the chart for the (TLT) below, which has clearly broken the 200 day moving average. I think that this is a false breakout, and that we are not trading in a new $108-$112 trading range that prevailed last spring. Note that while the 200-day average is busted, the 200-week is still putting up fierce resistance. This may well be the line in the sand that counts.
Next, take a look at the chart for the Japanese yen (FXY), (YCS). This is crucial because the yen is the world?s funding currency, thanks to its zero interest rates. When traders are in ?RISK OFF? MODE, they dump their positions in all asset classes and buy yen to repay their broker loans. This forces the yen to appreciate against the US dollar, something the Japanese government is loathe to seeing. This occurs on a scale of trillions of dollars.
When investors throw caution to the wind and pile back into ?RISK ON? portfolios, the reverse happens. They borrow yen and sell them to finance new positions, sending the yen down. Weakness in the yen is therefore the first place you will see a recovery in global markets.
The yen chart bellows shows that it is taking a run at its 200 day moving average at $97.91. That is only $1.70 up from here, and in line with ?100 to the dollar in the cash market, another important resistance level.
My expectation is that the yen will fail here and return to its longer-term downtrend, bringing a major 6% rally against the greenback to an end. That will send a great flashing green light to traders that the buyers strike is over and that its time to get back to work.
You see a very similar inverse chart with the S&P 500 (SPX). The bottom here also appears to be the 200 day moving average at 1,708, a mere 32 points below today?s low. That is only one bad day away. Watch for a rally from here to trigger simultaneous sell offs in the Treasury bond and yen markets.
You can play this game all day long. A confirming move of a top in interest rates would be a big rally in bank shares, which need higher interest rates to make more money. So keep a laser focus on Bank of America (BAC) and Citigroup (C). At the same time, gold (GLD) will once again get thrown out with the trash, since higher rates punish holders here with a greater opportunity cost.
This all may happen sooner than you think. The Friday January nonfarm payroll neatly sets up a double top in the volatility index at $21. Get a good number, like over 200,000, and see substantial back month revisions up, and volatility will collapse back to the mid teens. Everything else I described above will come to pass.
However, I won?t find out what transpired until Saturday. When the Department of Labor releases the anxiously awaited report, I should be fast asleep in my first class cabin somewhere over French Polynesia on my way to New Zealand. Send me an email on what happens.
The Nonfarm What?Global Market Comments
February 4, 2014
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(THREE CORRECTIONS FOR THE PRICE OF ONE),
(TLT), (TBT), (SPY),
(CHINA?S VIEW OF CHINA),
(FXI), (EEM)
(FEBRUARY 12 AUCKLAND NEW ZEALND STRATEGY LUNCH)
iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond (TLT)
ProShares UltraShort 20+ Year Treasury (TBT)
SPDR S&P 500 (SPY)
iShares China Large-Cap (FXI)
iShares MSCI Emerging Markets (EEM)
I love this market action. For me, it means that we are setting up ideal entry points for a broad range of asset classes that will deliver another +67% year.
It will set up for you too, if you continue to read this letter.
What the market is in fact doing is giving us three corrections for the price of one. Remember the traditional September swoon that never happened, the worst trading month of the year? How about the forgotten ritual October crash? And the November dip that always precedes the December yearend rally?
Well guess what? After forgetting how to go down for the longest period of time, we are getting all three downturns compressed into a single big one. That will give us a start finish decline of 7.2% in the (SPX) down to 1730, in line with every correction of the past two years (see chart below), and worst case the proverbial 10% textbook correction.
If my assumptions are correct, then in a worst-case scenario we are already 75% through this pullback on a price basis, and 65% on a time basis. Needless to say, selling short stocks here is out of the question. That train left the station at New Years.
After sitting on my hands, shuffling the papers around my desk several times, and going for my umpteenth coffee refill, I finally pulled the trigger on my iShares Barclays 20+ Year Treasury Bond Fund June, 2014 $106 puts trade. It finally entered no brainer territory.
It hit me what had been driving markets this year, but it took a ten-pound sledgehammer to do it.
Bonds have had it absolutely right this year. They took off right out of the gate on January 2 and never looked back.
Stocks on the other hand have been much more confused and disoriented, like an airplane pilot doing aerobatics on Instrument Flight Rules. They initially rose a little bit, right along with bonds, which almost never happens. You knew that wasn?t going to last.
Then they flat lined for two weeks. It took almost a month before traders realized that the punch bowl was gone and it was time to head into ?RISK OFF? mode. The tardy call can be traced to the fact that you calculate your average stock traders? IQ by taking a bond trader?s and then dividing by two.
What all this means is that the bond market has been correctly calling market direction two weeks before the stock market has. This is bound to continue.
There is another factor to consider here. Bond traders have now seen a whopping great eight point rally in a month, taking the yield on the ten year Treasury bond down a massive 45 basis points, from 3.05% to 2.61%. That is just too much profit to sit on.
That is a world ending performance for bonds. Except that Armageddon, it is not. So the pros that got this one right are increasingly going to be sellers on rallies from here on.
Don?t forget that the Federal Reserve will probably continue to knock $10 billion off of its quantitative easing program every six weeks if the economic data continues to come in, as I expect. That could drop its monthly bond purchases from $85 billion a month in December to only $35 billion by June. This is not good for the (TLT). It?s nice to see all of those lunches at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco with the new chairman, Janet Yellen, finally paying off.
If I am wrong on this one, it will be only by a couple of basis points, with the ten year possibly making it to the high 2.50%?s. The global synchronized economic recovery is still on schedule. The economic data and corporate earnings are just too good to see yields drop to 2.50% or lower.
Bull markets don?t die of old age, they die from recessions, and there is absolutely none on the horizon. The weakness in emerging markets is happening because some of their growth is moving back to the US. That is bad for them and great for us. I never liked their food anyway.
Markets also don?t peak at the middle of historic valuation range of 9-22. We are now at 14.5 if the $120/share earnings forecast for 2014 is good.
Profit margins are at all time highs, and rising (see chart below). The heart-rending volatility we have seen so far in 2014 is therefore technical in nature, and not fundamentally driven. It is just a matter of a few days or weeks until the fundamentals reassert themselves, as they always do.
Strip out the drag of government spending, and the private sector is growing at a positively meteoric 5.1% annual rate.
That could happen as early as Friday, when a blockbuster nonfarm payroll is expected to hit. The shocking 84,000 December number reported in January was a weather driven anomaly. Expect this week?s January figure to come in strong, as well as providing big upward revisions to the December report.
Which brings me to the iShares Barclays 20+ Year Treasury Bond Fund June, 2014 $106 put. Only a global synchronized recession would prevent the (TLT) from trading below $103.58, my breakeven point on an expiration basis, over the next five months. Those who can?t buy options can substitute the ProShares Ultra Short 20+ Treasury ETF (TBT) instead.
If the (TLT) makes it back to unchanged on the year at $101 by the June 20 expiration, this position will be up $5,418, or $5.41% for our notional $100,000 portfolio. If it makes it down to $101 sooner, we will make even more money, as there will still put some remaining time value in the put option.
That is up 108% from my initial cost. For that I am willing to take a few basis points of heat for a few days or weeks. It is an ideal buy and hold position, like, for example, you were just about to take a long trip to New Zealand and Australia.
Sounds like a no brainer to me!
The Fat Lady is Singing for the Bond MarketGlobal Market Comments
February 3, 2014
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(FEBRUARY 5 GLOBAL STRATEGY WEBINAR),
(NOW WE?RE COOKING WITH GAS),
(AMERICA?S DEMOGRAPHIC TIME BOMB),
(TESTIMONIAL)
Now We?re Cooking With Gas (UNG)
Those who followed my advice to buy the United States Natural Gas Fund (UNG) July, 2014 $23 puts at $1.68 yesterday are now in the enviable position of owning a security that is running away to the upside.
At this morning?s high the puts traded at $2.40, a one day gain of an eye popping 43%. I am getting emails from a lucky few that they got in as low as $1.55 after receiving my Trade Alert.
The question is now what to do about it.
I just called friends around the country, and it appears that a warming trend is in place that could last all the away into mid February. It is starting in Florida and Texas and gradually working its away north, although they are still expecting eight inches of snow in Chicago this weekend.
Mad Day Trader Jim Parker is confirming as much with his proprietary trading model chart, which I have included below. He says that we put in an excellent medium term high in the UNG on Thursday at $27. This morning we tested daily support at $23.26 and it held the first time.
But with warmer weather, this is almost certain to break on a future downside push. Then we train out sites on the 18-day moving average at $22.25. After that, $22.07 is in the cards, the top of the gap that we broke through only as recently as January 27, only four days ago.
There, our United States Natural Gas Fund (UNG) July, 2014 $23 puts, with a present delta of 40% (forget this if you don?t speak Greek), should be worth $2.83. You might get more, if implied volatilities for the puts rise on the downside, which they almost always do.
That would be a one-day profit of 68%, adding $3,000 to the value of our notional $100,000 model trading portfolio, or 3% to our performance this year, which I would be inclined to take.
Now it is time to get clever. It would be wise to enter a limit day order to sell your $23 puts right now at the $2.68 price. Since the first visit to these lower numbers usually happens on a big downside spike, the result of stop loss dumping of panic longs accumulated by clueless short term traders this week, you might get lucky and get filled on the first run. If you don?t, keep reentering the limit order every day until it does get done, or until we change our strategy.
This has been one of my best trades in years, and it appears that a lot of followers managed to successfully grab the tiger by the tail.
If there was ever a time to upgrade to Jim Parker?s Mad Day Trader service, it is now. He will see the breakdowns and the reversals with his models faster than I, and get his Trade Alerts out quicker. Why wait for the middleman, who is me? These fast, technically driven markets are where Jim really earns his pay.
If you want to get a pro rata upgrade from your existing newsletter or Global Trading Dispatch subscription to Mad Hedge Fund Trader PRO, which includes Mad Day Trader, just email Nancy in customer support at nmilne@madhedgefundtrader.com.
Do it quick because she is about to get overwhelmed.
Now We?re Cooking with GasGlobal Market Comments
January 31, 2014
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(TIME TO SELL NATURL GAS),
(UNG), (USO),
(MAD HEDGE FUND TRADER 2014 GLOBAL STRATEGY LUNCHEON SCHEDULE)
United States Natural Gas (UNG)
United States Oil (USO)
Time to Sell Natural Gas
I received a crackly, hard to understand call late last night from one of my old natural gas buddies in the Barnet shale in Texas. Chances are that CH4 peaked in price last night with the expiration of the front month contract. It was time to sell.
I spent five years driving a beat up pick up truck on the tortuous, jarring, washboard roads of this forlorn part of the country, buying up mineral rights from old depleted fields for pennies on the dollar.
The sellers thought I was some moron hippie from California, probably high on some illegal drugs. "You want to redrill these fields and throw dynamite down the holes?" It was a crazy idea. Since I was offering hard cash, they couldn't sign the dotted line fast enough.
During the late nineties nobody had ever heard of fracking. Even in the oil industry only a few specialists were aware of it. My old buddy, Boone Pickens, claims he was doing it in the fifties, but then nothing the wily oilman ever does surprises me.
Only a few reckless independent wildcatters were experimenting with the new process. The oil majors wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole. It was unproven, dangerous, and could never deliver sufficient volumes to get them interested. With the deep pockets a trial lawyer could only dream about, they couldn't afford the liability risk of polluting a town's drinking water. So it was left to small fry like me to finance this ground-breaking technology.
I ended up developing a couple of fields, riding gas up from $2 to $5 MMBTU, then selling them off to the gas companies. My partners and I made a fortune.
We have remained in touch over the years. Whenever something indecipherable happens in the international capital markets, they call me for an explanation. When something special sets up in the natural gas market, I get the first call.
On Election Day we all go out and get drunk because their conservative vote cancels out my liberal ones, so why bother? We do this at Billy Bob's in Fort Worth, a favorite of former President George W. Bush, where the 24-ounce chicken fried steaks fall over both sides of your plate.
I didn't reenter the gas market until the Amaranth hedge fund blow up took the price up to $17 in 2006, and then down like a stone. I figured out that the United States Natural Gas Fund (ETF) suffered from a peculiar mathematics that was death for long side investors.
The natural gas futures market often trades in a contango. This is when front month contracts trade at a big premium to far month ones, adjusted for the cost of borrowed money. This premium completely disappears at expiration, when the commercial buyers, like electric power plants and chemical companies, take physical delivery of the gas.
What (UNG) does is buy contracts three months out, run them into expiration, and then roll the money into new contracts another three months out. The premium they pay rapidly falls to zero. Then they repeat the process all over again. It is a perfect wealth destruction machine.
The same dilemma besets futures contracts for oil (USO), corn (CORN), wheat (WEAT), and soybeans (SOYB) to a lesser degree, and a lot of traders make their livings from these anomalies.
What (UNG) does is buy contracts three months out, run them into expiration, and then roll the money into new contracts another three months out. The premium they pay rapidly falls to zero. Then they repeat the process all over again. It is a perfect wealth destruction machine.
I have seen a period when natural gas rose 40%, but the (UNG) dove 40%, thanks to the costly effects of the contango. Needless to say, this makes the (UNG) the world's greatest short vehicle in a falling market. It is a fantastic heads I will, tails you lose security.
There is another crucial factor making natural gas such a great natural short that few outside the industry are aware of. You cannot store natural gas to the degree you can semi liquid oil. Unlike Texas tea, natural gas wells can't be capped without damaging their long-term production. It has to flow and be sold at whatever price you can get. If you don't, it goes away. This means that when the price of natural gas falls, it does so with a turbocharger, also making it an ideal short play.
To make a long story short, I made another fortune riding gas down from $17 to $2. I haven't touched it for 2 years. Other hedge fund manager friends of mine made billions on this trade, and then retired to a sedentary life of philanthropy.
At this point, natural gas is up an unbelievable 56% in three months, thanks to Mother Nature's brutal assault on most of the country, except here in balmy California. Demand is at an all time high, prices a 5-year peak, and speculative long positions in the futures market at an eight-year apex. Storage was taken down to a six month low of 1.2 trillion cubic feet with today's 230 billion cubic foot draw down.
Expiration of the front month contract triggered a super spike in the (United States Natural Gas Fund to an astounding $27, while underling natural gas made it all the way up to $5.50, nearly triple the subterranean $1.90 low set in April, 2012.
This is happening in the face of one of the greatest supply onslaughts in history that will hit the market throughout the rest of this year. They're still hiring and drilling like crazy in North Dakota.
The demand spike came hard and so fast that it caught many suppliers by surprise. That has created a bubble in the pipeline, a temporary shortfall in supplies, and triggered an incredible short squeeze in the natural gas market.
Winter can't last forever. Eventually summer comes, and the shortage of natural gas pipeline will get more than made up by thousands of new fracking wells in the US.
If the UNG returns to the November, 2013 $17 low by July 18, the value of the (UNG) July, 2014 $23 put rises from our $1.68 cost to $4.72, a potential gain of 181%. That's a fabulous risk/reward ratio, and we have six months to see it happen.
Keep in mind that liquidity could be an issue here. Yesterday, 1,549 contracts traded against on open interest of 2,297 contracts. The option market spreads here are also humongously wide and the volatility is of biblical proportions, which is endemic to the natural gas market.
Just to get a second opinion, I called Mad Day Trader Jim Parker, as I hadn't been in this market for a while. He said it was warming up in Chicago, and he was venturing outside for a walk for the first time in three days. Out went the Trade Alert!
Below please find a chart for natural gas generated by Jim?s proprietary trading model. The bottom line here is that there is a high probability that we will drop from the current $5.17 down to $4.70, break that, go down to $4.17, break that, and possibly go as low at the November low of $3.40.
They don?t call this market the ?widow maker? for nothing, so expect a lot of heart wrenching volatility before you see a substantial payoff. So it best to enter a spread of small limit orders and hope for the best.
You can best play the short side through the futures market in natural gas. For those without a futures account, you can buy the 2X ProShares Ultra Short DJ-UBS Natural Gas inverse ETF (KOLD) or the 3x Direxion Daily Natural Gas Related Bear 3X Shares inverse ETF (GASX). The more adventurous can sell short the (UNG) outright, if they can find stock to borrow.
Time to Sell Winter Short
Billy Bob?s in Forth Worth