There are two types of trading accounts permitted by Australian financial regulators:

Cash Accounts ? opened by individuals
Regulation ?T? accounts -? opened by corporations and trusts

Reg ?T? accounts have no problems executing any of my Trade Alerts, including those for stocks, bonds, exchange trade funds, options, call spreads, and put spreads. However, regulators have recently barred Cash Accounts from trading in call spreads and put spreads.

Their logic is that individuals lack the financial sophistication to engage in these types of trades. The reality is the opposite, they are limiting individuals to engage in higher risk positions while banning them from the lower risk ones. Welcome to the world of financial regulation!

The easy way around this is for individuals to set up a paper corporation for the purpose of handling their trading activities. This is far easier than it first appears. My friends at Halifax Investment Services will do this for you for as little at AUS$575. One swipe of your credit card and you are in business.

The benefits of doing this are huge. You can then execute every type of trade under the sun, including all of the Mad Hedge Fund Trader?s Trade Alerts. You can also reduce your tax rate from as high as 47% that hits profits in Cash Accounts to only a mere 30%. I don?t know how people in the Land Down Under view taxation, but here in the US it is absolutely despised.

Every professional trader in Australia operates through a corporate entity, and you would be mad not to do so. If the past is any guide, long-term followers of my service all have one problem in common: they make too much money, creating unforeseen tax headaches.

There is one other way to deal with the Australian regulator?s discrimination against individual investors: wait a couple months. They have been sued by a number of individuals and organizations seeking to block this double standard. My in country tax attorneys tell me that a resolution is expected soon. Once the issue is settled, the only difference between Reg T and Cash Accounts will be the tax rate.

To avail yourselves of these services, please open an account with Halifax Investment Services Ltd. by clicking here at http://madhedgefundradio.com/hisl-australia/. There, you will be asked to complete a form with your basic information. Within a few days, you should receive a phone call from a Halifax financial advisor who has been assigned to provide you assistance.

Good Luck and good trading!

Did You Say Only a 30% Tax Rate?

My friend, Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group, a global risk analyst who I regularly follow, has published an outstanding book entitled The End of the Free Markets: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations. I find this highly depressing, as it takes me as long to read one of Ian?s books as it takes him to write another one. To read a review of his highly insightful tome published in 2008, The Fat Tail: The Power of Political Knowledge for Strategic Investing, please click here. The world is reaching a tipping point. For the past 40 years, global multinationals with unfettered access to capital, consumer, and labor markets have driven the world economy. There is now a new competitor on the scene, the ?state capitalist,? where political considerations trump economic ones in the allocation of resources. Of course, China is the main player, joined by several other emerging nations. The Middle Kingdom has posted double-digit annual growth for the past 30 years without freedom of speech, economic rules of the road, and independent judiciary, and credible property rights. China?s leadership is clearly worried that Western style freedoms will enable wealth to be generated outside their control and be used to orchestrate their overthrow. Private Western companies can only engage in transactions, which stand on their own economically and deliver the short-term profits, which their shareholders demand. In China, long-term political goals enable them to pay through the nose to obtain stable supplies of oil, gas, minerals, and materials. That keeps the country?s massive work force employed, off the streets, and politically neutered. The bottom line is that there are now two competing forms of capitalism. The recent financial crisis has accelerated their entrance to the global stage, moving us from a G7 to a G20 dominated world. Globalization is not ending, but it is definitely entering a new chapter. For those of us who read tea leaves to ascertain major, market moving economic trends, this will be a must read. To buy the book at Amazon, please click here.