You are in safe hands now, with your trading portfolios up 41.13% on the year, if you had followed every one of my Trade Alerts to the letter. I know a lot of you made much more.

I will be making a beeline for well on my beachfront estate at Incline Village on the pristine shores of Lake Tahoe and work from there for the next two weeks.

The car will be packed with Christmas presents, ski equipment, snowshoes, board games (yes, ?Qi? is a word in Scrabble), my backpack, and food for 12 guests for a week.

For proof that after working 12 hours a day, six days a week, to make you wealthier and wiser, please read my last research piece of the year, written tongue in cheek.

And what a year it has been. Over 26 trips and 40 speaking engagements in 20 countries, I managed to log 75,000 flight miles, a distance of roughly three times around the world.

Some 250,000 frequent flier miles were posted to my various accounts. Whenever I board Virgin Airlines, the crew lines up at attention and snaps off a brisk salute. Needless to say, first class, for me, is the Land of Milk and Honey.

The research I gathered was enough for me to publish 260 daily letters totaling 350,000 words. That is about half the length of Tolstoy?s War and Peace, but then Tolstoy had to pen his with a quill and ink, not Word for Windows.

I also managed to pump out over 200 trade alerts with a success ratio of 80%.

According to the email traffic, many of you did extremely well. If you are into triple digits, please send me an email. I would love to get a testimonial from you. And this was a year that many professionals describe as the most difficult of their careers.

You know that when they are advertising power tools and Pajamagrams on CNBC, it is time to get out of Dodge. I?ll take the hint.

There, I will consume a suitcase full of research and, after much cogitation and contemplation, write my 2016 Annual Asset Review, which I will publish on Tuesday, January 5, 2015.

I will also be rethinking my business model, so if any of you have suggestions on how I can improve this service, send your thoughts to me at madhedgefundtrader@yahoo.com.

Just put ?suggestions? in the subject line. My intention is to never stop improving the product, to under promise and over deliver.

Please forgive me in advance if I take a few hours catching some ?big air? off of Squaw Valley?s treacherous double X black runs.

If you have any trading questions, please seek me out on the northern section Tahoe Rim Trail around 11,000 feet, where I will be snowshoeing my way around the lake at in subzero temperatures.

I will probably be the only guy up there, so you can just follow the first set of tracks you find. That is, if the timber wolves don?t get you.

I?ll have my Bowie knife and a can of bear spray, so I?ll be fine. As for you, I?m not so sure. This is what I do during my winter leisure time.

During my absence I will be posting some of my favorite pieces from the last year which give insights on how markets will play out over the coming decades.

I have thousands of new subscribers who will be reading these for the first time, and many legacy readers may have missed them the first time around, or forgotten the data because they are older than me.

I hope you find them as another useful step towards your education on the global financial markets. Charts and data have been updated to make them relevant.

Finally, I want to thank you all for an incredible year. I rode the Orient express from London to Venice. I lived in the lap of luxury at the Hotel Cipriani in Venice and at the Raffles in Singapore.

And I managed to haggle the merchants in Tangier's historic bazaar down in price of the most elegant hand made carpets.

I had the opportunity to meet heads of state, CEO?s, top money managers, our nation?s military leaders, and even a Maori chieftain. I had the pleasure of flying the length of the Grand Canyon at low altitude, weaving my way along the Colorado River. And, oh yes, I finally made it to the top of the Matterhorn one more time.

I really did get to rub shoulders with the high and mighty who run the world and harvest their pearls of wisdom, which I passed on to you. I logged 200 hours as a pilot flying to such diverse locations as Molycorp?s (MCP) Mountain Pass mine, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, and Honda?s loading docks in San Francisco.

I never minded the horrendous jet lag, the well-deserved hangovers, or the traffic jams in China. Your subscriptions to my products, your support of my research, and your endless compliments made it all worth it.

I always tell people that I am not in this for the money, and it?s true.

Not a day goes by when I don?t receive an email from a grateful reader who claims that I have paid off their mortgage, a kid?s college education, a parent?s uninsured operation, or a child?s chemotherapy.

They tell me that I am teaching them to fish; thus, sparing them from the frozen tasteless kind they sell at Safeway, which they must wait in line for to pay inflated prices. You can?t buy that kind of appreciation, not with all the money in the world.

It certainly beats the hell out of spending my retirement scoring a 98 on the local golf course. And I?ll never beat Tiger Woods, no matter how many blonds I date.

To leave you all in the Christmas spirit, I have posted a video and pictures of the Polar Express in Portland, Oregon. Taking my 86-year-old mother for a ride has become an annual event, and it is a thrill for my younger kids as well. To watch a short video of one of the largest steam engines in the world, please click here.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to All
Good Trading in 2016!

John Thomas
The Mad Hedge Fund Trader

 

You?ve Got to Know the Right People to Call This Market

 

Not a day goes by when someone doesn?t ask me about what to do about Apple (AAPL).

After all, it is the world largest company. It is the planet?s most widely owned stock. Almost everyone uses their products in some form or another.

So the widespread interest is totally understandable.

Apple is a company with which I have a very long relationship. During the early 1980?s, I was ordered by Morgan Stanley to take Steve Jobs around to the big New York institutional investors to pitch a secondary share offer for the sole reason that I as one of three people who worked for the firm who was then from California.

They thought one West Coast hippy would easily get along with another. Boy, were they wrong. It was the worst day of my life.

Today, some 200 Apple employees subscribe to the Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader, looking to diversify their substantial holdings. Many own Apple stock with an adjusted cost basis of under $5. Suffice it to say, they all drive really nice Prius?s.

So I get a lot of information about the firm far above and beyond the normal effluent of the media and stock analysts. That?s why Apple has become a favorite target of my Trade Alerts over the years.

And here is the take: You don?t want to touch the stock during the first quarter of 2016.

And here?s why. Apple is all about the iPhone, which accounts for 75% of its total earnings. The TV, the watch, the car, iPods, the iMac, and Apple pay are all a waste of time, and consume far more coverage than they are collectively worth.

The good news is that iPhone sales are subject to a fairly reliable cycle. Apple launches a major new iPhone every other fall. The share price peaks shortly after that. The odd years see the introduction of the ?S? models. But these are minor upgrades, not generational changes.

So during those in between years, the stock performance is disappointing. 2015 certainly has followed this script, with Apple up a modest 1.2% YTD as of this writing.

The coming quarter could be especially scary.

Just like you see a big pull back in the tide before a tsunami hits, iPhone sales are flattening out. This is because consumers start delaying purchases in expectation of the introduction of the iPhone 7 in September 2016 with far more power, gadgets, and gizmos.

Channel checks, however dubious these may be, are already confirming the slowdown of orders for iPhone related semiconductors from suppliers you would expect from such a downturn.

The weakness assures that the current selloff will continue. With any luck, you might be able to pick up shares in the $90?s, last seen during the August 25 flash crash.

However, after March things will start to get interesting, especially post the Q1 earnings report in April. That?s when investors will start to discount the rollout of the iPhone 7 five months later.

The last time this happened, in 2014, Apple stock rocketed by 88.5%. This time, I expect at least a 50% increase to $150, if you can get in around $100.

After all, I am such a conservative guy with my predictions..

Even at that price, it will still be one of the cheapest stocks in the market on a valuation basis. The value players will have not choice to join in, if they?re not already there.

But Apple is a much bigger company this time around, and well-established cycles tend to bring in diminishing returns. It?s like watching the declining peaks of a bouncing rubber ball.

The bull case for Apple isn?t dead, it is just resting.

The China business will continue to grow nicely. Their new lease program promises to deliver a faster upgrade cycle that will allow higher premium prices for their products. That will bring larger profits.

Just thought you?d like to know.