Global Market Comments
September 1, 2020
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(RIGHT SIZING YOUR TRADING)
Global Market Comments
August 31, 2020
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(MARKET OUTLOOK FOR THE WEEK AHEAD, or A TALE OF FOUR CHARTS),
(NASD), (TLT), (GLD), (JPM), (FB), (AAPL), (AMZN), (TSLA)
Listening to 27 presentations during the Mad Hedge Traders & Investors Summit last week (click here for the replays), I couldn’t help but notice something very interesting, if not alarming.
All the charts are starting to look the same.
You would expect all the technology charts to be similar on top of the historic run we have seen since the March 23 bottom.
But I wasn’t only looking at technology stocks.
Analyzing the long-term charts for stock indexes, bonds, real estate, and gold, it is clear that they ALL entered identical parabolic moves that began during the notorious Christmas bottom in December 2018.
With the exception of the pandemic induced February-March hiccup this year, it has been straight up ever since.
The best strategy of all for the past three years has been to simply close your eyes and buy EVERYTHING and then forget about it. It really has been the perfect idiot’s market.
This isn’t supposed to happen.
Stocks, bonds, real estate, and gold are NEVER supposed to be going all in the same direction at the same time. The only time you see this is when the government is flooding the financial system with liquidity to artificially boost asset prices.
This latest liquidity wave started when the 2017 Trump tax bill initiated enormous government budget deficits from the get-go. It accelerated when the Federal Reserve backed off of quantitative tightening in mid-2019.
Then it really blew up to tidal wave proportions with the Fed liquidity explosion simultaneously on all fronts with the onset of the US Corona epidemic.
Asset classes have been going ballistic ever since.
From the March 23 bottom, NASDAQ is up an astounding 78%, bonds have gained an unprecedented 30%, the US Homebuilders ETF has rocketed a stagging 187%, and gold has picked up an eye-popping 26%.
That’s all well and good if you happen to be long these asset classes, as we have been advising clients for the past several months.
So, what happens next? After all, we are in the “What happens next?” business.
What if one of the charts starts to go the other way? Is gold a good hedge? Do bonds offer downside protection? Is there safety in home ownership?
Nope.
They all go down in unison, probably much faster than they went up. If fact, such a reversal may be only weeks or months away. If you live by the sword you die, by the sword.
Assets are now so dependent on excess liquidity that any threat to that liquidity could trigger a selloff of Biblical proportion, possibly worse than what we saw during February-March this year.
And you wouldn’t need simply a sudden tightening of liquidity to prompt such a debacle. A mere slowdown in the addition of new liquidity could bring Armageddon. The Fed in effect has turned all financial markets into a giant Ponzi scheme. The second they quit buying, they all crash.
The Fed and the US Treasury have already started executing this retreat surreptitiously through the back door. Some Treasury emergency loan programs were announced with a lot of fanfare but have yet to be drawn down in size because the standards are too tight.
The Fed has similarly shouted from the rooftops that they would be buying equity convertible bonds and ETFs but have yet to do so in any meaningful way.
If there is one saving grace for this bull market, it's that it may get a second lease on life with a new Biden administration. Now that the precedent for unlimited deficit spending has been set by Trump, it isn’t going to slow down anytime soon under the Democrats. It will simply get redirected.
One of the amazing things about the current administration is that they never launched a massive CCC type jobs program to employ millions in public works as Roosevelt did during the 1930s to end that Great Depression. Instead, they simply mailed out checks. Even my kids got checks, as they file their own tax returns to get a lower tax rate than mine.
I think you can count on Biden to move ahead with these kinds of bold, expansionist ideas to the benefit of the nation. We are still enjoying enormously the last round of such spending 85 years ago, the High Sierra trails I hiked weeks ago among them.
Stocks soared on plasma hopes. Trumps cited “political” reasons at the FDA for the extended delay. Scientists were holding back approval for fears plasma was either completely useless and would waste huge amounts of money or would kill off thousands of people. At best, plasma marginally reduces death rates for those already infected, but you’re that one it’s worth it. Anything that kills Covid-19 is great for stocks.
Existing Home Sales were up the most in history in July, gaining a staggering 24.7% to 5.86 million units. Bidding wars are rampant in the suburbs. Investors are back in too, accounting for 15% of sales. Inventories drop 21% to only 3.1 months. These are bubble type statistics. Can’t hold those Millennials back! This will be a lead sector in the market for the next decade. Buy homebuilders on dips.
Goldman said a quarter of job losses are permanent, as the economy is evolving so fast. Many of these jobs were on their way out before the pandemic. That could be good news for investors as those cost cuts are permanent, boosting profits. At least, that’s what stocks believe.
Hedge funds still love big tech, even though they are now at the 99th percentile of historic valuation ranges. Online financials, banks, and credit card processors also rank highly. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Massive Zoom crash brought the world to a halt for two hours on Monday morning. It looked like a Chinese hack attack intended to delay online school opening of the new academic year. Unfortunately, it also delayed the start of the Mad Hedge Traders & Investors Summit.
The Dow Rebalancing is huge. Dow Jones rarely rejiggers the makeup of its famed but outdated index. But changing three names at once is unprecedented. One, Amgen (AMGN) I helped found, working on the team the discovered its original DNA sequencing. All of the founding investors departed yonks ago. The departure of Exxon (XOM) is a recognition that oil is a dying business and that the future is with Salesforce (CRM), whose management I know well. One big victim is Apple (AAPL) whose weighting in the index has shrunk.
The end of the airline industry has begun, with American (AAL) announcing 19,000 layoffs in October. That will bring to 40,000 job losses since the pandemic began. The industry will eventually shrink to a handful of government subsidized firms and some niche players. Avoid like a plat in a spiral dive.
30 million to be evicted in the coming months, as an additional stimulus bill stalls in Congress. It will no doubt be rolling evictions that stretch out over the next year. This will be the true cost of failing to deal with the virus.
When we come out the other side of this, 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% 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.
My Global Trading Dispatch suffered one of the worst weeks of the year, giving up most of its substantial August performance. If you trade for 50 years, occasionally you get a week like this. The good news is that it only takes us back to unchanged on the month.
Longs in banks (JPM) and gold (GLD) and shorts in Facebook (FB) and bonds (TLT) held up fine, but we paid through the nose with shorts in Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN), and Tesla (TSLA).
That takes our 2020 year to date down to 26.56%, versus +0.05% for the Dow Average. That takes my eleven-year average annualized performance back to 35.58%. My 11-year total return retreated to 382.47%.
It is jobs week so we can expect a lot of fireworks on the data front. The only numbers that really count for the market are the number of US Coronavirus cases and deaths, which you can find here.
On Monday, August 31 at 10:30 AM EST, the Dallas Fed Manufacturing Index for August is released.
On Tuesday, September 1 at 9:45 AM EST, the Markit Manufacturing Index for August is published.
On Wednesday, September 2, at 8:13 AM EST, the August ADP Employment Change Index for private-sector job is printed.
At 10:30 AM EST, the EIA Cushing Crude Oil Stocks are out.
On Thursday, September 3 at 8:30 AM EST, the Weekly Jobless Claims are announced.
On Friday, September 4, at 8:30 AM EST, The August Nonfarm Payroll Report is released.
At 2:00 PM The Bakers Hughes Rig Count is released.
As for me, I’ll be catching up on my sleep after hosting 27 speakers from seven countries and entertaining a global audience of 10,000 from over 50 countries and all 50 US states. We managed to max out Zoom’s global conferencing software, and I am now one of their largest clients.
It was great catching up with old trading buddies from decades past to connect with the up-and-coming stars.
Questions were coming in hot and heavy from South Africa, Singapore, all five Australian states, the Persian Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, East Africa, and every corner of the United Kingdom. And I was handling it all from my simple $2,000 Apple laptop from nearby Silicon Valley.
It is so amazing to have lived to see the future!
To selectively listen to videos of any of the many talented speakers, you can click here.
See you there.
John Thomas
CEO & Publisher
The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader
Global Market Comments
August 28, 2020
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(BACK FROM MY 50-MILE HIKE)
Global Market Comments
August 27, 2020
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(WHY YOU MISSED THE TECHNOLOGY BOOM AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT NOW),
(AAPL), (AMZN), (MSFT), (NVDA), (TSLA), (WFC), (FB)
I often review the portfolios of new subscribers looking for fundamental flaws in their investment approach and it is not unusual for me to find some real disasters.
The Armageddon scenario was quite popular a decade ago. You know, the philosophy that said that the Dow ($INDU) was plunging to 3,000, the US government would default on its debt (TLT), and gold (GLD) was rocketing to $50,000 an ounce?
Those who stuck with the deeply flawed analysis that justified those conclusions saw their retirement funds turn to ashes.
Traditional value investors also fell into a trap. By focusing only on stocks with bargain-basement earnings multiples, low price to book values, and high visible cash flows, they shut themselves out of technology stocks, far and away the fastest growing sector of the economy.
If they are lucky, they picked up shares in Apple a few years ago when the earnings multiple was still down at ten. But even the Giant of Cupertino hasn’t been that cheap for years.
And here is the problem. Tech stocks defy analysis because traditional valuation measures don’t apply to them.
Let’s start with the easiest metric of all, that of sales. How do you measure the value of sales when a company gives away most of its services for free?
Take Google (GOOG) for example. I bet you all use it. How many of you have actually paid money to Google to use their search function? I would venture none.
What would you pay Google for search if you had to? What is it worth to you to have an instant global search function? Probably at least $100 a year. With 70% of the global search market comprising 2 billion users that means $140 billion a year of potential Google revenues are invisible.
Yes, the company makes a chunk of this back by charging advertisers access to these search users, generating some $38.94 Billion in revenues and $9.95 billion in net income in the most recent quarter. It would have been an $8.2 billion profit without the outrageous $5 billion fine from the European Community.
But much of the increased value of this company is passed on to shareholders not through rising profits or dividend payments but through an ever-rising share price. If you’re looking for dividends, Google doesn’t exist. It is also very convenient that unrealized capital gains are tax-free until the shares are sold.
I’ll tell you another valuation measure that investors have completely missed, that of community. The most successful companies don’t have just customers who buy stuff, they have a community of members who actively participate in a common vision, which is then monetized. There are countless communities out there now making fortunes, you just have to know how to spot them.
Facebook (FB) has created the largest community of people who are willing to share personal information. This permits the creation of affinity groups centered around specific interests, from your local kids’ school activities to municipality emergency alerts, to your preferred political party.
This creates a gigantic network effect that increases the value of Facebook. Each person who joins (FB) makes it worth more, raising the value of the shares, even though they haven’t paid it a penny. Again, it’s advertisers who are footing your tab.
Tesla (TSLA) has 400,000 customers willing to lend it $400 billion for free in the form of deposits on future car purchases because they also share in the vision of a carbon-free economy. When you add together the costs of initial purchase, fuel, and maintenance savings, a new Tesla Model 3 is now cheaper than a conventional gasoline-powered car over its entire life.
REI, a privately held company, actively cultivates buyers of outdoor equipment, teaches them how to use it, then organizes trips. It will then pursue you to the ends of the earth with seasonal discount sales. Whole Foods (WFC), now owned by Amazon (AMZN), does the same in the healthy eating field.
If you spend a lot of your free time in these two stores, as I do, The United States is composed entirely of healthy, athletic, good looking, and long-lived people.
There is another company you know well that has grown mightily thanks to the community effect. That would be the Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader, one of the fastest growing online financial services firms of the past decade.
We have succeeded not because we are good at selling newsletters, but because we have built a global community of like-minded investors with a common shared vision around the world, that of making money through astute trading and investment.
We produce daily research services covering global financial markets, like Global Trading Dispatch and the Mad Hedge Technology Letter. We teach you how to monetize this information with our books like Stocks to Buy for the Coming Roaring Twenties and the Mad Hedge Options Training Course.
We then urge you to action with our Trade Alerts. If you want more hands-on support, you can upgrade to the Concierge Service. You can also meet me in person to discuss your personal portfolios at my Global Strategy Luncheons.
The luncheons are great because long term Mad Hedge veterans trade notes on how best to use the service and inform me on where to make improvements. It’s a blast.
The letter is self-correcting. When we make a mistake, readers let us know in 60 seconds and we can shoot out a correction immediately. The services evolve on a daily basis.
It all comes together to enable customers to make up to 50% to 60% a year on their retirement funds. And guess what? The more money they make, the more products and services they buy from me. This is why I have so many followers who have been with me for a decade or more. And some of my best ideas come from my own subscribers.
So, if you missed technology now, what should you do about it? Recognize what the new game is and get involved. Microsoft (MSFT) with the fastest-growing cloud business offers good value here. Amazon looks like it will eventually hit my $3,000 target. You want to be buying graphics card and AI company NVIDIA (NVDA) on every 10% dip.
You can buy the breakouts now to get involved, or patiently wait until the 10% selloff that usually follows blowout quarterly earnings.
My guess is that tech stocks still have to double in value before their market capitalization of 26% matches their 50% share of US profits. And the technologies are ever hyper-accelerating. That leaves a lot of upside even for the new entrants.
I Finally Found Tech Stocks!
Global Market Comments
August 26, 2020
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(THE TRADE OF THE CENTURY IS SETTING UP),
(TLT), (TBT), ($TNX)
(HOW TO BUY A SOLAR SYSTEM),
(SPWR), (TSLA)
How about if I told you there was a relatively low-risk trade setting up that offered a 200% return? Would it help if I told you it was in the world’s most liquid market?
So, I bet you’re thinking about the latest small-cap technology stocks, Bitcoin, vintage cars, or collectible French postage stamps.
In reality, I’m talking about the US Treasury bond market.
I’m not saying you should add this position today, nor am I advocating that you bet the ranch on this one. But there is one hell of a trade setting up in the coming months.
Let’s go through what Albert Einstein used to call a “thought experiment.”
Today, the United States Treasury Bond Fund (TLT) is trading near an all-time high at $166. If you go a mere $25 out-of-the-money, you can buy the (TLT) January 2022 $140-$143 vertical bear put spread for $1.00.
If interest rates rocket from today’s 0.65% to back up to 1.40% and the (TLT) collapses from $166 down to $140 by January 21, 2022, the value of this position will soar from $1.00 cents to $3.00, a net gain of 200%.
This is not some pie-in-the-sky, Armageddon type scenario. This, in fact, was the level of interest rates that prevailed only in March, five months ago. The nice thing about seeing interest rates on the way down, you always get to revisit them again on the way up.
I can pretty much guarantee you that when the (TLT) peaks out, celebrity commentators on CNBC, analysts at JP Morgan, and strategists at Seeking Alpha will be running around with their hair on fire screaming that the next stop is much higher.
That’s always how things end.
Not only that, you might get the chance to put these on for several months in a row, in which case you will have multiple 200% gains in a row lining up.
Like I said, there is one heck of a trade setting up. All you have to do is be patient.
The Fat Lady is Singing for the Treasury Bond Market
It’s just a question of how long it takes for Moore’s law-type efficiencies to reach exponential growth in the solar industry.
Accounting for 4% of the country’s electrical power supply today, we are only five doublings away from 100% when energy essentially becomes free.
California, alone, has over one million homes with solar installations, changing the grid beyond all recognition. As a result, mid-day peak electricity demand times when the sun is the brightest have become low demand times, while sunsets bring on the new peak demand times.
The next question beyond the immediate trading implications is, “What’s in it for me?”
I should caution you that after listening to more than 20 pitches, almost all of the information you get from fly-by-night solar installation salesmen is inaccurate. Most don’t know the difference when it comes to a watt, an ohm, or a volt.
I think they were mostly psychology or philosophy majors, if they went to college at all.
The promised 25-year guarantees are only as good as long as the installing firms stay in business, which for some will not be long.
Talking to these guys reminded me of the aluminum siding salesmen of yore. It was all high pressure, exaggerated benefits, and relentless emailing.
I come to this issue with some qualifications of my own, as I have been designing and building my own solar systems for the past 50 years.
During the early 1960s, when solar cells first became available to the public through Radio Shack (RIP), I used to create from scratch my own simple sun-powered devices. But when I measured the output, I would cry, finding barely enough power to illuminate a tiny flashlight bulb.
We have come a long way since then. For years I watched my organic beansprout-eating, Birkenstock-wearing neighbors install expensive, inefficient solar arrays because it was good for the environment, politically correct, and saved the whales.
However, when I worked out the breakeven point compared to conventional power sources, it stretched out into decades.
So, I held off.
It wasn’t until 2015 when solar price/performance hit the breakeven sweet spot acceptable for me, about six years. Five years in, and I already earned my original investment back.
You see, a funny thing happened on the way to the future. First, our local power utility, PG&E (PGE) went bankrupt. That paved the way for several back-to-back 7.5% rate increases to bail the company out, making solar much cheaper by comparison.
Don’t get complacent because you don’t live in the Golden State and have not been subject to PGE’s travails. The public utility business model is 120 years old everywhere and is about to disappear nationally.
You may have noticed that it has been very hot for the last several years. Thanks to global warming, my solar system is becoming much more efficient, not less as I expected. The length of the days is the same, but they seem to operate more efficiently at high temperatures.
Solar technologies have been improving about 10% a year since I installed my last system in 2015, including higher silicon efficiency rates, improved microinverters, and better software management. They are now 40% cheaper than when I installed my last system.
The numbers are now so compelling, that even a number-crunching, blue state-hating Texas oilman should be installing silicon on his roof.
A lot are.
As for me, I have just tripled up my own system, moving from 19 SunPower (SPWR) panels to 59. That will take my total output from 8 watts to 23watts. My total electricity output is 54,000 kWh a day worth $1,000 a month. After charging my energy-hungry Tesla Model X, I am left with $400 a month worth of excess power, which I sell back to (PGE). The checks arrive once a year.
For the icing on the cake this time, I installed three of the newest 15,000 kWh Tesla Powerwall’s, which store enough electricity to run my home indefinitely, since they are recharged daily by the sun.
With (PGE) averaging six days a year in rolling power blackouts a year, that is a handy thing to have. That gives me true grid independence AND net earnings of $3,000 a year.
If you need a push from behind, consider this. If you go to contract, by the end of the year the US government will pay for 26% of your entire system through a federal “alternative energy” tax credit. That incentive will almost certainly go up next year. Some states, like California, pile additional subsidies on top of this. And Mosaic will finance 100% of your project with a bargain basement 2.99% loan.
Here are my conclusions upfront: Learn about “tier shaving” from your local utility, and buy, don’t lease. All electrical utility plans are local.
First, about the former.
Every utility has a tiered system of charging customers on a prorated basis. A minimal amount of power for a low-income family of four living in a home with less than 1,500 square feet, about 20% of the U.S. population, costs about 10 cents a kilowatt-hour.
This is a function of the high level of public power utility regulation in the U.S., where companies are granted local monopolies. There are a lot of trade-offs, local politics, and quid pro quos that are involved in setting electric power rates.
For example, PG&E (PGE) has five graduated billing tiers, with the top rate at 55 cents a kWh for mansion dwelling energy hogs like me (one Tesla in the garage and another on the way).
In order to minimize your up-front capital cost, you want to buy all the power you can at the poor person rate, and then eliminate the top four tiers entirely. Do this, and you can cut the cost of your new solar system by half.
Your solar provider will ask for your recent power bills and will help you design a system of the right size.
Warning! They will try to sell you more than you need. After all, they are in the solar panel selling business, not the customer-value-for-money delivery business.
Don’t focus too much on the panels themselves, as they are only 25% of a system’s costs. The big installers constantly play a myriad of panel manufacturers off against each other to get the cheapest bulk supplies.
I picked SunPower because they have the most advanced technology, best solar conversion rate, and are American-made. That’s me, Mr. first class all the way!
The majority of the expense is for labor and local permitting.
Buzzkill warning!
PG&E has to pay me only its lowest marginal cost of power, or 4 cents/kWh. That is why it pays to under build your system, which for me cost $2.49/kWh to install, net of the tax credit.
This was the quid pro quo that enabled PG&E to agree to the whole plan in the first place. So, you won’t get rich off your solar system.
However, I am now protected against any price increase for electricity for the next 25 years!
Oh, and my $100,000 investment has increased the value of my home by $200,000, according to my real estate friend.
Now for the lease or buy question. If you don’t have $100,000 for a cutting-edge, state-of-the-art solar installation, (or $16,000 for a normal size house with no Teslas), or you want to preserve your capital for your trading account, you may want to lease from a company.
The company will design and install an entire system for you for no money down and lease it to you for 20 years. But after your monthly lease payment, it will end up keeping half the benefit, and raise your cost of electricity annually. However, this is still cheaper than continuing to buy conventional power.
So if you can possibly afford it, buy, don’t rent.
This being Silicon Valley, niche custom financing firms have emerged to let you have your cake and eat it, too.
Dividend Solar (click here for their site) will lend you the money to buy your entire system yourself, thus qualifying you for the investment tax credit.
As long as you use the tax credit to repay 30% of your loan principal within 15 months, the interest rate stays at 6.49% for the 20-year life of the loan. Otherwise, the interest rate then rises to a credit card like 9.99%. A FICO score of only 690 gets you in the door.
There are a few provisos to add.
You can’t install solar panels on clay or mission tile roofs popular in the U.S. Southwest (where the sun is), or tar and gravel roofs, as the breakage or fire risk is too great. The racks that hold the panels down in hurricane-force winds simply won’t fit.
If you want to maintain your aesthetics, you can take the mission tiles off, install a simple composite shingle roof, bolt your solar panels on top, then put back the clay tiles around the edges. That way it still looks like you have a mission tile roof.
Also, it is best to install your system in the run-up to the summer solstice, when the days are longest and the sunshine brightest. Solar systems produce 400% more power on the longest day of the year compared to the shortest, because of the lower angle of the sun’s rays hitting the Northern Hemisphere.
Yes, a total American solar energy supply in 25 years sounds outrageous, insane, and even ludicrous (to use some of Elon Musk’s favorite words).
But, so did the idea of a 3-gigahertz laptop microprocessor for a mere $1,000 50 years ago, when Moore’s law first applied.
The graphics for my own upgraded solar power supply bill are below:
A Tale of Plunging Power Bills
Global Market Comments
August 25, 2020
Fiat Lux
SPECIAL AMAZON ISSUE
Featured Trade:
(WHY AMAZON IS BEATING ALL), (AMZN)
