“Sometimes, when you jump off a bridge, you have to grow your wings on the way down,” said author Danielle Steele.
Global Market Comments
December 10, 2020
Fiat Lux
FEATURED TRADE:
(MY 20 RULES FOR TRADING IN 2021)
Nothing like starting the new year with going back to basics and reviewing the rules that worked so well for us in 2020. Call this the refresher course for Trading 101.
I usually try to catch three or four trend changes a year, which might generate 100-200 trades, and often come in frenzied bursts.
Since I am one of the greatest tightwads that ever walked the planet, I only like to buy positions when we are at the height of despair and despondency, and traders are raining off the Golden Gate Bridge like a winter downpour.
Similarly, I only like to sell when the markets are tripping on steroids and ecstasy and are convinced that they can live forever.
Some 99% of the time, the markets are in the middle, and there is nothing to do but deep research and looking for the next trade. That is the purpose of this letter.
Over the five decades that I have been trading, I have learned a number of trends and true rules which have saved my bacon countless times. I will share them with you today.
1) Don’t over trade. This is the number one reason why individual investors lose money. Look at your trades of the past year and apply the 90/10 rule. Dump the least profitable 90% and watch your performance skyrocket. Then aim for that 10%. Overtrading is a great early retirement plan for your broker, not you.
2) Always use stops. Risk control is the measure of the good hedge fund trader. If you lose all your capital on the lemons, you can’t play when the great trades set up. Consider cash as having an option value.
3) Don’t forget to sell. Date, don’t marry your positions. Remember, hogs get fed and pigs get slaughtered. My late mentor, Barton Biggs, told me to always leave the last 10% of a move for the next guy.
4) You don’t have to be a genius to play this game. If that was required, Wall Street would have run out of players a long time ago.
If you employ risk control and stops, then you can be wrong 40% of the time, and still make a living. That’s a little better than a coin toss. If you are wrong only 30% of the time, you can make millions.
If you are wrong a scant 20% of the time, you are heading a trading desk at Goldman Sachs. If you are wrong a scant 10% of the time, you are running a $20 billion hedge fund that the public only hears about when you pay $100 million for a pickled shark at a modern art auction.
If someone says they are never wrong, as is often claimed on the Internet, run a mile, because it is impossible. By the way, I was wrong 15% of the time in 2013. That’s what you’re paying for.
5) This is hard work. Trading attracts a lot of wide-eyed, naïve, but lazy people because it appears so easy from the outside. You buy a stock, watch it go up, and make money. How hard is that? The reality is that successful investing requires twice as much work as a normal job. The more research you put into a trade, the more comfortable you will become, and the more profitable it will be. That’s what this letter is for.
6) Don’t chase the market. If you do, it will turn back and bite you. Wait for it to come to you. If you miss the train, there will be another one along in minutes, hours, days, weeks, or months. Patience is a virtue.
7) Limit Your Losses. When I put on a position, I calculate how much I am willing to lose to keep it. I then put a stop just below there. If I get triggered, I just walk away. Emotion never enters the equation. Only enter a trade when the risk/ reward is in your favor. You can start at 3:1. That means only risk a dollar to potentially make three.
8) Don’t confuse a bull market with brilliance. I am not smart, just old as dirt.
9) Tape this quote from the great economist and early hedge fund trader of the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes, to your computer monitor: "Markets can remain illogical longer than you can remain solvent." Hang around long enough, and you will see this proven time and again (ten-year Treasuries at 0.32%?!).
10) Don’t believe the media. I know, I used to be one of them. There is a reason why they are talking heads and not billionaire traders. Look for the hard data, the numbers, and you’ll see that often the talking heads, the paid industry apologists, and politicians don’t know what they are talking about (the Gulf oil spill will create a dead zone for decades?).
Average out all the public commentary, and half are bullish and half bearish at any given time. The problem is that they never tell you which one is right (that is my job). When they all go one way, the markets usually go the opposite direction.
11) When you are running a long/short portfolio, 80% of your time is spent managing the shorts. If you don’t want to do the work, then cash beats a short any day of the week.
12) Sometimes the conventional wisdom is right.
13) Invest like a fundamentalist, execute like a technical analyst. This is what all the pros do.
14) Use technical analysis only, and you will buy every rally, sell every dip, and end up broke. That said, learn what an “outside reversal” is, and who the hell is that Italian guy, Leonardo Fibonacci.
15) The simpler a market approach, the better it works. Everyone talks about “buy low and sell high”, but few actually do it. All black boxes eventually blow up, if they were ever there in the first place.
16) Markets are made up of people. Understand and anticipate how they think, and you will know what the markets are going to do.
17) Understand what information is in the market and what isn’t and you will make more money.
18) Do the hard trade, the one that everyone tells you that you are “Mad” to do. If you add a position and then throw up on your shoes afterwards, then you know you’ve done the right thing. This is why people started calling me “Mad” 40 years ago. (What? Tech stocks were a huge buy the first week of January?).
19) If you are trying to get out of a hole, the first thing to do is quit digging and throw away the shovel. Sell everything. A blank position sheet can be invigorating ad illuminating.
20) Making money in the market is an unnatural act, and fights against the tide of evolution.
We humans are predators and hunters evolved to track game on the horizon of an African savanna. Modern humans are maybe 5 million years old, but civilization has been around for only 10,000 years.
Our brains have not had time to make the adjustment. In the market, this means that if a stock has gone up, you believe it will continue to do so.
This is why market tops and bottoms see volume spikes. To make money, you have to go against these innate instincts.
Some people are born with this ability, while others can only learn it through decades of training. I am in the latter group.
Great Hunter, Lousy Trader
"Bonds are priced artificially because you've got some guy buying tens of billions of dollars worth a month. That will change at some point, and when it does, people are going to lose a lot of money," said Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett.
Global Market Comments
December 9, 2020
Fiat Lux
FEATURED TRADE:
(THE DEATH OF KING COAL)
(KOL), (PEA)
Global Market Comments
December 8, 2020
Fiat Lux
FEATURED TRADE:
(THE BRAVE NEW WORLD OF ONLINE RETAILING),
(SNAP), (GPRO), (APRN), (SFIX)
Global Market Comments
December 7, 2020
Fiat Lux
FEATURED TRADE:
(MARKET OUTLOOK FOR THE WEEK AHEAD, or A DICEY LANDING)
(SPY), (TLT), (AMZN), (TSLA), (CRM), (JPM), (CAT), (BABA),
(FCX), (GLD), (SLV), (UUP), (FXE), (FXA), (FXB), (FXY), (FXI), (EWZ), (THD), (EPU)
Landing my 1932 de Havilland Tiger Moth biplane can be dicey.
For a start, it has no brakes. That means I can only land on grass fields and hope my tail skid catches before I run out of landing strip. If it doesn’t, the plane will hit the end, nose over, and dump a fractured gas tank on top of me. Bathing in 30 gallons of 100 octane gasoline with sparks flying is definitely NOT a good long term health plan.
The stock market is starting to remind me of landing that Tiger Moth. On Friday, all four main stock indexes closed at all-time highs for the first time since pre-pandemic January. A record $115 billion poured into equity mutual funds in November. This has all been the result of multiple expansion, not newfound earnings.
Yet, stocks seem hell-bent on closing out 2020 at the highs.
And there is a major factor that the market is completely ignoring. What if the Democrats win the Senate in Georgia?
If so, Biden will have the weaponry to go bold. The economy goes from zero stimulus to maybe $6 trillion raining down upon it over the next six months. That will go crazy, possibly picking up another 10%, or 3,000 Dow points on top of the post-election 4,000 points we have seen so far.
That is definitely NOT in the market.
The other big decade-long trend that is only just starting is the weak US dollar. Lower interest rates for longer were reaffirmed by the appointment of my former economics professor Janet Yellen as Treasury Secretary.
A feeble dollar brings us a fading bond market, as half the buyers are foreigners. A sickened greenback also provides the launching pad for all non-dollar assets to take off like a rocket, including commodities (FCX), precious metals (GLD), (SLV), Bitcoin, and the currencies (UUP), (FXE), (FXA), (FXB), (FXY), and emerging stock markets like China (FXI), Brazil (EWZ), Thailand (THD), and Peru (EPU).
All of this is happening in the face of a US economy that is clearly falling apart. Weekly jobless claims for November came in at 245,000, compared to a robust 638,000 in October, taking the headline unemployment rate down to 6.9%. The real U6 unemployment rate stands at an eye-popping 12.0%, or 20 million.
Some 10.7 million remain jobless, 900,000 higher than in February. Transportation and Warehousing were up 140,000, Professional & Business Services by 60,000, and Health Care 46,000. Retail was down 35,000 as stores shut down at a record pace.
OPEC cuts a deal, adding 500,000 barrels a day to the global supply. The hopes are that a synchronized global recovery can take additional supply. Texas tea finally busts through a month's long $44 cap, the highest since March. Avoid energy. I’d rather buy more Tesla, the anti-energy.
Black Friday was a disaster, with in-store shopping down 52%. Long lines and 25% capacity restrictions kept the crowds at bay. If you don’t have an online presence, you’re dead. In the meantime, online spending surged by 26%.
Amazon (AMZN) hires 437,000 in 2020, probably the greatest hiring binge since WWII, and is continuing at the incredible rate of 3,000 a week. That takes its global workforce to 1.2 million. Most are $12 an hour warehouse and delivery positions. The company has been far and away the biggest beneficiary of the pandemic as the world rushed to online commerce.
Tesla’s (TSLA) full self-driving software may be out in two weeks, instead of the earlier indicated two years. The current version only works on freeways. The full street to street version could be worth $8,000 a car in upgrades. Another reason to go gaga over Tesla stock.
Goldman Sachs raised Tesla target to $780, the Musk increased market share to a growing market. No threat from General Motors yet, just talk. Volkswagen is on the distant horizon. In the meantime, Tesla super bear Jim Chanos announced he is finally cutting back his position. He finally came to the stunning conclusion that Tesla is not being valued as a car company. Go figure. Short interest in Tesla has plunged from a peak of 35% in March to 6% today. It’s learning the hard way.
The U.S. manufacturing sector pauses, activity in the U.S. manufacturing sector barely ticked up in November as production and new orders cratered, data from a survey compiled by the Institute for Supply Management showed on Tuesday. The ISM Manufacturing Report on Business PMI for November stood at 57.5, slipping from 59.3 in October.
Salesforce (CRM) overpays for workplace app Slack, knocking its stock down 9%. This is worth a buy the dip trade in the short-term and this is still a great tech company which is why the Mad Hedge Tech Letter sent out a tech alert on Salesforce on the dip.
Weekly Jobless Claims dive, with Americans applying for unemployment benefits falling last week to 712,000 down from 787,000 the week before. The weakness is unsurprising as we head into seasonal Christmas hiring.
The end of the tunnel for Boeing (BA) as they bring to an end an awful 2020. Irish-based airline Ryanair Holdings placed a large order for a set of brand new Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, giving the plane maker a shot in the arm as the single-aisle jet comes off an unprecedented 20-month grounding.
Ryanair, Europe’s low-cost carrier, has 135 Boeing 737 MAX jets on order and options to bring the total to 200 or more. Hopefully, they won’t crash this time around. My fingers are crossed.
Dollar Hits 2-1/2 Year Low. With global economies recovering, the next big-money move will be out of the greenback and into the Euro (FXE), the Aussie (FXA), the Looney (FXC), the Japanese yen (FXY), the British pound (FXB), and Bitcoin. Keeping interest rates lower for longer will accelerate the downtrend.
When we come out the other side of this pandemic, we will be perfectly poised to launch into my new American Golden Age, or the next Roaring Twenties. With interest rates still at zero, oil cheap, there will be no reason not to. The Dow Average will rise by 400% to 120,000 or more in the coming decade. The American coming out the other side of the pandemic will be far more efficient and profitable than the old. Dow 120,000 here we come!
My Global Trading Dispatch catapulted to another new all-time high. December is up 5.34%, taking my 2020 year-to-date up to a new high of 61.78%.
That brings my eleven-year total return to 417.69% or double the S&P 500 over the same period. My 11-year average annualized return now stands at a nosebleed new high of 38.00%. My trailing one-year return exploded to 64.56%. I’m running out of superlatives, so there!
I managed to catch the 50%, two-week Tesla melt-up with a 5X long position, which is always nice for performance.
The coming week will be a slow one on the data front. We also need to keep an eye on the number of US Coronavirus cases at 14.5 million and deaths at 285,000, which you can find here.
When the market starts to focus on this, we may have a problem.
On Monday, December 7 at 4:00 PM EST, US Consumer Credit is out.
On Tuesday, December 8 at 11:00 AM, the NFIB Business Optimism Index is published.
On Wednesday, December 9 at 8:00 AM, MBA Mortgage Applications for the previous week are released.
On Thursday, December 10 at 8:30 AM, the Weekly Jobless Claims are published. At 9:30 AM, US Core Inflation is printed.
On Friday, November 11, at 9:30 AM EST, the US Producer Price Index is announced. At 2:00 PM, we learn the Baker-Hughes Rig Count.
As for me, at least there is one positive outcome from the pandemic. Boy Scout Christmas tree sales are absolutely through the roof! We took delivery of 1,300 trees from Oregon for our annual fundraiser expected to sell them in two weeks. We cleared out our entire inventory in a mere six days!
We sold trees as fast as we could load them. With the scouts tying the knots, only one fell onto the freeway on the way home. An “all hands on deck” call has gone out to shift the inventory.
It turns out that tree sales are booming nationally. The $2 billion a year market places 21 million trees annually at an average price of $8 and are important fundraisers for many non-profit organizations. It seems that people just want something to feel good about this year.
Governor Gavin Newsome’s order to go into a one-month lockdown Sunday night inspired the greatest sales effort I have ever seen, and I worked on a Morgan Stanley sales desk! We shifted the last tree hours before the deadline, which was full of mud with broken branches and had clearly been run over by a truck at a well-deserved 50% discount.
I can’t wait until next year!
Stay healthy.
John Thomas
CEO & Publisher
The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader
Global Market Comments
December 4, 2020
Fiat Lux
FEATURED TRADE:
(WHY WATER WILL SOON BE WORTH MORE THAN OIL),
(CGW), (PHO), (FIW), (VE), (TTEK), (PNR), (BYND),
(WHY WARREN BUFFETT HATES GOLD),
(GLD), (GDX), (ABX), (GOLD)
Global Market Comments
December 3, 2020
Fiat Lux
FEATURED TRADE:
(WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE GREAT DEPRESSION DEBT?),
($TNX), (TLT), (TBT),
