“Rational people don’t risk what they have and need for what they don’t have and don’t need,” said Oracle of Omaha Warren Buffet.
Global Market Comments
August 8, 2022
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(MARKET OUTLOOK FOR THE WEEK AHEAD, or THE BOTTOM IS IN),
(AAPL), (AMZN), (GOOGL), (MSFT), (TSLA)
When the train conductor says “Run”, it’s generally not a good sign.
That’s what happened to me when I had to make a crucial transfer in Visp, Switzerland last month. I’m fine with running. With 200 pounds of luggage? Not so much.
A lot of fund managers started running from their cash positions last week. Tesla (TSLA) shorts ran even faster.
There is a rising sense of panic among money managers today.
The stock market just brought in a blockbuster 7.9% return in July, and they are underweight stocks and loaded with cash. What they DO own are in all the wrong defensive sectors.
A panic is imminent.
A soft landing for the economy is in the cards. There are still plenty of risks out there, as there always are. But bond yields have collapsed, commodity and energy prices are in free fall, and the futures markets are indicating that interest rate hikes ahead will be modest at best.
The Fed is also getting an assist in its tightening efforts from a strong dollar, which pares U.S. multinational earnings, and a recessionary China and Europe. Those two alone are the equivalent of another 100 basis points in rate rises.
The Fed’s work has already been done for it.
The Fed’s Quantitative Tightening is also sucking $120 million a month out of the economy.
The bond vigilantes who were riding hard in the first half have gone to sleep, or at least gone on vacation. That has dropped ten-year US Treasury yields by an amazing 100 basis points in seven weeks. That doesn’t seem to warrant an over-aggressive Fed to me.
Remember also that interest rates no longer have the impact on the economy they once had. The stock of every company I buy has no net debt and are in fact huge net creditors, like Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN), Alphabet (GOOGL), and Microsoft (MSFT).
Those that have refinanced their debts at 150-year lows over the last three years, including myself (30-year fixed rate mortgage at 2.75%, some 6.35% under the current inflation rate!).
No credit crunch here, or distressed financial institutions, the fodder of past recessions.
Sure, earnings have come down. But they are being shaved, not decimated. Again, the companies I buy aren’t growing at a modest 5%-10%, but more like 40%-50%, like Tesla (TSLA). Slow growing companies are other peoples’ problems, not mine.
Better yet, they are likely to bounce back hard next year, which is what the market is discounting now.
I’m buying next year’s market, while everyone else is still selling this year’s.
The bottom line is that the U.S. has the strongest economy and currency in the world, making its stocks deserving of a serious premium. Add up rate rises, QT, a strong greenback, a recessionary world, the largest deficit reduction in history, war, and stocks STILL can’t go down.
It's an old trader’s nostrum that if you dump bad news on a market and it fails to go down, you buy the heck out of it. This is one of those times.
That makes my yearend forecast of an S&P 500 of 4,800 by year-end not only possible but likely. Buy every substantial dip in every one of your favorite stocks from here on out. You might be risking 10%-20% over the short term but gain 100% on a three-year view.
The risk/reward is overwhelmingly in your favor.
I hope this helps.
July Nonfarm Payroll Hits a Blockbuster 528,000, double expectations, the best since February. The Headline Unemployment rate fell to 3.5%, a new post pandemic low. No recession here. Average hourly earnings popped 0.5%. The Dow dropped $250 as possible scenarios were already discounted in the market in a classic “Buy the rumor, sell the news” move. Bond yields soared. The difficulty in finding workers is overwhelming recession fears. Hotels and restaurants created enormous numbers of jobs. The Fed now has a license to maintain aggressive interest rate rises. My bond short in the (TLT) is looking good.
Weekly Jobless Claims hit 260,000, an 8-month high, as recession fears fan the flames. That beats the 1 million figure we saw at the pandemic high two years ago. Layoffs are falling. That makes tomorrows July Nonfarm Payroll Report more important than usual.
Fed Says More Rate Hikes Coming but No Recession, says St Louis Fed president James Bullard. I couldn’t agree more. If inflation dips look for only a 50-basis point rate hike in September. Stocks will soar.
England Predicts Major Recession after hiking interest rates by 0.50% to 1.75%. The Bank of England expects inflation to peak at 13.3%. Europe economy is in the toilet and China is weak. It all highlights how America now has the strongest economy in the world and is therefore the first choice for equity investors.
Weak Chinese Data Torpedoes Oil, down 34% from its February peak. Oil is now lower than when the Ukraine War started. Manufacturing PMI dropped from 51.7 to 50.4, barely outside recessionary data. New Chinese Covid shutdowns are the cause. Could this recession go global?
Home Prices fall at a Record Pace, down from a 19.3% annual gain to 17.3% in June, according to Black Knight, a mortgage analytics firm. Some 25% of major U.S. markets saw growth slow by three percentage points in June. It’s all about interest rates.
Mortgage Rates Drop Below 5%, for the 30-year fixed, a four-month low. It’s putting a floor under the housing market. Refi’s are still near zero. The collapse in bond yields is feeding through.
Half of U.S. Homes are Equity Rich, indicating homeowner equity is more than 50% of market value. That makes available trillions of dollars in potential second mortgages to support the economy. Americans are richer than they think.
Tesla Voted to Split Shares. The 3:1 split will make the shares more affordable for lower-end (poorer) investors who want to make the millions we have for the past decade. Watch for a spike in the price as share splits always attract a hoard of short-term meme investors. The last 5:1 split in 2020 brought an eye-popping near doubling of the shares in six months
ISM Non-Manufacturing Gains 2%, in June where tech lives. It shows that our “recessionary” economy may be stronger than you think, especially in the right sectors. No wonder stocks are going up every day.
Carried Interest Lives Again, with Arizona’s Kristin Sinema stopping the abolishment of tax-free treatment of hedge funds and private equity funds as her pound of flesh for backing Biden’s stimulus bill. People have been trying to end carried interest since President Carter pushed it through in 1979 to jump-start venture capital and Silicon Valley. It truly demonstrates the power of lobbying and will lead to more concentration of wealth at the top. Look for a vote next week.
My Ten-Year View
When we come out the other side of pandemic and the recession, we will be perfectly poised to launch into my new American Golden Age, or the next Roaring Twenties. With oil peaking out soon, and technology hyper accelerating, there will be no reason not to. The Dow Average will rise by 800% to 240,000 or more in the coming decade. The America coming out the other side will be far more efficient and profitable than the old. Dow 240,000 here we come!
With some of the greatest market volatility in market history, my August month-to-date performance reached +0.46%.
My 2022 year-to-date performance expanded to 55.29%, a new high. The Dow Average is down -9.64% so far in 2022. It is the greatest outperformance on an index since Mad Hedge Fund Trader started 14 years ago. My trailing one-year return maintains a sky-high 74.73%.
That brings my 14-year total return to 567.85%, some 2.39 times the S&P 500 (SPX) over the same period and a new all-time high. My average annualized return has ratcheted up to 44.83%, easily the highest in the industry.
We need to keep an eye on the number of US Coronavirus cases at 91 million, up 300,000 in a week, and deaths topping 1,033,000 and have only increased by 2,000 in the past week. You can find the data here at https://coronavirus.jhu.edu.
On Monday, August 8, there is no data of note.
On Tuesday, August 9 at 8:30 AM, the NFIB Business Optimism Index for July is out.
On Wednesday, August 10 at 8:30 AM, the CPI Index for July is published.
On Thursday, August 11 at 8:30 AM, Weekly Jobless Claims are announced. The Producer Price Index for August is printed.
On Friday, August 12 at 7:00 AM, the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index is disclosed. At 2:00 the Baker Hughes Oil Rig Count is out.
As for me, I had the good fortune to live with a Nazi family in West Berlin during the 1960s. While working at the Sarotti chocolate factory in Templehof, my boss took pity on me and invited me to move in with his family. I jumped at the chance of free rent and all the German food I could eat.
What I learned was amazing.
Even though the Germans had lost WWII 20 years earlier, they still believed in the core Nazi beliefs. However, they loved Americans as we had saved them from the Bolsheviks, especially in Berlin. President Kennedy had delivered his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech only seven years earlier.
There have been thousands of books written about wartime Germany, but almost none about what happened afterwards. I absorbed dozens of stories from my adopted German family, and I’ll tell you one of the most unbelievable ones.
In the weeks after the German surrender on May 7, 1945, Berlin was shattered. The city had been the subject of countless 1,000 bomber raids and the population had shrunk from 5 million to only 1.5 million. Most of the military-aged men were absent. Survivors were living under the rubble.
What’s worse, everyone knew that the allies would soon declare the German currency, the Reichsmark, worthless and replace it with a new one, wiping out everyone’s life savings. So, they had to spend as fast as they could. But with the economy in ruins, there was nothing to buy. In any case, the only thing they really wanted was food, which they could get on a thriving black market.
It turned out that there was only one thing they could buy in unlimited quantities:
Movie tickets.
When Hitler came to power in 1933, one of the first things he did was ban American movies. The industry was taken over by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels who only permitted propaganda films promoting Nazi values for domestic consumption.
The only American film permitted in Germany during the 1930s was Grapes of Wrath because it highlighted U.S. weaknesses. Movie production was shut down completely in 1943 because of the war’s demands on supplies.
When the war ended, suddenly, the iconic movies of the Great Depression became available, such as the works of the Marx Brothers, Shirley Temple, The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, and King Kong.
Impromptu movie theaters were thrown up against standing walls of destroyed buildings. Within two weeks of the surrender, half of Berlin’s prewar 550 theaters had reopened. Of a population of 1.5 million, 850,000 movie tickets were sold every weekend. The summer of 1945 became one long film festival. The Germans laughed, cried, and were enthralled.
Every weekend was a sellout. The only movie that bombed that summer was a U.S. Army documentary about the concentration camps. But even that one sold 400,000 tickets.
The movies had a therapeutic effect on the German people. It distracted them from their daily privations, starvation, and suffering. It also allowed them to reconnect with western civilization. Ask any Berliner about what they did after the war and all they will talk about are the movies.
The allies finally did withdraw the Reichsmark in 1948. Individuals were only permitted to convert $40 out of the old currency into the new Deutschmark, which was then worth 25 cents. Only those who had title to land maintained their wealth, and most of those were farmers in the new West Germany.
I hope you enjoyed this little fragment of unwritten history, which I find amazing. But then, I find everything amazing.
Stay healthy,
John Thomas
CEO & Publisher
The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader
Berlin in 1945
Berlin in 1968
Global Market Comments
August 5, 2022
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(A NEW THEORY OF EQUITIES)
Global Market Comments
August 4, 2022
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(A NOTE ON ASSIGNED OPTIONS, OR OPTIONS CALLED AWAY),
(TLT), (TSLA)
In the run up to every options expiration, which is the third Friday of every month, there is a possibility that any short options positions you have may get assigned or called away.
If that happens, there is only one thing to do: fall down on your knees and thank your lucky stars. You have just made the maximum possible profit for your position instantly.
Most of you have short option positions, although you may not realize it. For when you buy an in-the-money vertical option spread, it contains two elements: a long option and a short option.
The short options can get “assigned,” or “called away” at any time, as it is owned by a third party, the one you initially sold the put option to when you initiated the position.
You have to be careful here because the inexperienced can blow their newfound windfall if they take the wrong action, so here’s how to handle it correctly.
Let’s say you get an email from your broker telling you that your call options have been assigned away. I’ll use the example of the Microsoft (MSFT) July 2022 $200-$210 in-the-money vertical BULL CALL spread.
For what the broker had done in effect is allow you to get out of your call spread position at the maximum profit point 7 days before the July 15 expiration date. In other words, what you bought for $8.80 is now $10.00!
All have to do is call your broker and instruct them to exercise your long position in your (MSFT) July 2022 $200 calls to close out your short position in the (MSFT) July 2022 $210 calls.
This is a perfectly hedged position, with both options having the same expiration date, and the same amount of contracts in the same stock, so there is no risk. The name, number of shares, and number of contracts are all identical, so you have no exposure at all.
Calls are a right to buy shares at a fixed price before a fixed date, and one options contract is exercisable into 100 shares.
To say it another way, you bought the (MSFT) at $200 and sold it at $210, paid $8.80 for the right to do so, so your profit is $1.20 cents, or ($1.20 X 100 shares X 12 contracts) = $1,440. Not bad for an 18-day limited risk play.
Sounds like a good trade to me.
Weird stuff like this happens in the run-up to options expirations like we have coming.
A call owner may need to buy a long (MSFT) position after the close, and exercising his long July 2022 $200 call is the only way to execute it.
Adequate shares may not be available in the market, or maybe a limit order didn’t get done by the market close.
There are thousands of algorithms out there which may arrive at some twisted logic that the puts need to be exercised.
Many require a rebalancing of hedges at the close every day which can be achieved through option exercises.
And yes, options even get exercised by accident. There are still a few humans left in this market to blow it by writing shoddy algorithms.
And here’s another possible outcome in this process.
Your broker will call you to notify you of an option called away, and then give you the wrong advice on what to do about it. They’ll tell you to take delivery of your long stock and then most additional margin to cover the risk.
Either that or you can just sell your shares on the following Monday and take on a ton of risk over the weekend. This generates a ton of commission for the brokers but impoverishes you.
There may not even be an evil motive behind the bad advice. Brokers are not investing a lot in training staff these days. It doesn’t pay. In fact, I think I’m the last one they really did train.
Avarice could have been an explanation here but I think stupidity and poor training and low wages are much more likely.
Brokers have so many legal ways to steal money that they don’t need to resort to the illegal kind.
This exercise process is now fully automated at most brokers but it never hurts to follow up with a phone call if you get an exercise notice. Mistakes do happen.
Some may also send you a link to a video of what to do about all this.
If any of you are the slightest bit worried or confused by all of this, come out of your position RIGHT NOW at a small profit! You should never be worried or confused about any position tying up YOUR money.
Professionals do these things all day long and exercises become second nature, just another cost of doing business.
If you do this long enough, eventually you get hit. I bet you don’t.
Calling All Options!
"Artificial Intelligence is potentially more dangerous than nukes," said Andrew McAfee of the MIT Center for Digital Business.
Global Market Comments
August 3, 2022
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(GOOGLE’S MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH IN QUANTUM COMPUTING),
(GOOGL), (IBM)
Global Market Comments
August 2, 2022
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(AN INSIDER’S GUIDE TO THE NEXT DECADE OF TECH INVESTMENT),
(AMZN), (AAPL), (NFLX), (AMD), (INTC), (TSLA), (GOOG), (META)
Last weekend, I had dinner with one of the oldest and best-performing technology managers in Silicon Valley. We met at a small out-of-the-way restaurant in Oakland near Jack London Square so no one would recognize us. It was blessed with a very wide sidewalk out front and plenty of patio tables.
The service was poor and the food indifferent, as are most dining experiences these days. I ordered via a QR code menu and paid with a touchless Square swipe.
I wanted to glean from my friend the names of the best tech stocks to own for the long term right now, the kind you can pick up and forget about for a decade or more, a “lose behind the radiator” portfolio.
To get this information, I had to promise the utmost confidentiality. If I mentioned his name, you would say “oh my gosh!”
Amazon (AMZN) is now his largest holding, the current leader in cloud computing. Only 5% of the world’s workload is on the cloud presently so we are still in the early innings of a hyper-growth phase there.
By the time you price in all the transportation, labor, and warehousing costs, Amazon breaks even with its online retail business at best. The mistake people make is only focusing on this lowest of margin businesses.
It’s everything else that’s so interesting. While its profitability is quite low compared to the other FANG stocks, Amazon has the best growth outlook. For a start, third-party products hosted on the Amazon site, most of what Amazon sells, offer hefty 30% margins.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has grown from a money loser to a huge earner in just four years. It’s a productivity improvement machine for the world’s cloud infrastructure where they pass all cost increases on to the customer who, once in, buy more services.
Apple (AAPL) is his second holding. The company is in transition now justifying a massive increase in earnings multiples, from 9X to 25X. The iPhone has become an indispensable device for people around the world, and it is the services sold through the phone that are key.
The iPhone is really not a communications device but a selling device, be it for apps, storage, music, or third-party services. The cream on top is that Apple is at the very beginning of an enormous replacement cycle for its installed base of over one billion phones. Moving from upfront sales to a lifetime subscription model will also give it a boost.
Half of these are more than four years old, and positively geriatric in the tech world. More than half of these are outside the US. 5G has added a turbocharger.
Netflix (NFLX) is another favorite. The world is moving to “over the top” content delivery and Netflix is already spending twice as much on content as any other company in this area. This is why the company won an amazing 44 Emmys last year. This will become a much more profitable company as it grows its subscriber base and amortizes its content costs. Their cash flow is growing by leaps and bounds, which they can use to buy back stock or pay a dividend.
Generally speaking, there is no doubt that the pandemic has pulled forward some future technology demand with the stay-at-home trend. But these companies have delivered normal growth in a hard world.
5G has enabled better Internet coverage for everyone and increased the competitiveness of the telecom companies. Factory automation has been another big area for 5G, as it is reliable and secure, and can be integrated with artificial intelligence.
Transportation will benefit greatly. Connected self-driving cars will be a big deal, improving safety and the quality of life.
My friend is not as worried about government-threatened break-ups as regulation. There will be more restraints on what these companies can do going forward. Europe, which has no big tech companies of its own, views big American tech companies simply as a source of revenue through fines. Driving companies out of business through cutthroat competition is simply not something Europeans believe in.
Google (GOOG) is probably more subject to antitrust proceedings both in Europe and the US. The founders have both retired to pursue philanthropic activities, so you no longer have the old passion (“don’t be evil”).
Both Google and Meta (META) control 70% of the advertising market between them, which is inherently a slow-growing market, expanding at 5% a year at best. (META)’s growth has slowed dramatically, while it has reversed at (GOOG).
He is a big fan of (AMD), one of his biggest positions, which is undervalued relative to the other chip companies. They out-executed Intel (INTC) over the last five years and should pass it over the next five years.
He has raised value tech stocks from 15% to 30% of his portfolio. Apple used to be one of these. Semiconductor companies today also fall into this category. Samsung with 40% margins in its memory business is a good example. Selling for 10X earnings is ridiculously cheap. It is just a matter of time before semiconductors get rerated too.
He was an early owner of Tesla (TSLA) back in the nail-biting days when it was constantly running out of cash. Now they have the opposite problem, using their easy access to cash through new share issues as a weapon to fight off the other EV startups. Tesla is doing to Detroit what Apple did to the cell phone companies, redefining the car.
Its stock is overvalued now but will become much more profitable than people realize. They also are starting to extract services revenues from their cars, like Apple has. Tesla will grow revenues by 30%-50% a year for the next two or three years. They should sell several millions of the new small SUV Model Y. Most other companies bringing EVs will fall on their faces.
EVs are a big factor in climate change, even in China, the world’s biggest polluter. In Europe, they are legislating gasoline cars out of existence. If you can make money building cars in Fremont, CA, you can make a fortune building them in China.
Tech valuations are high, there is no doubt about it. But interest rates are much lower by comparison. The Fed is forcing people to buy stocks, enabling these companies to evolve even faster.
Tech stocks have a lot more things going for them than against them. The customers keep coming back for more.
Needless to say, the above stocks should make up your short list for LEAPS to buy at the coming market bottom.
