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.

Please come to hear me, Mad Hedge Fund Trader John Thomas, as the keynote speaker at the Invest Like a Monster Las Vegas Conference on June 13-14.

I will be joined by many old friends from across the investment spectrum. Jon and Pete Najarian will teach you the tricks of the trade for navigating the ever complex options markets.

Fellow former combat pilot, Chuck Hughes, will go into depth on his own highly successful approach to trading the market. To listen to my in depth interview with him on Hedge Fund Radio, please click here.
Well known market commentator Guy Adami, the Prince of New Jersey, will be there to give his trading insights. So will former hedge fund manager and Yahoo Finance guru Jeff Macke.

The first day will be devoted to three educational sessions that get into the nitty gritty of trading options. The day winds up with a cocktail party with the Najarian Brothers and me.

I will kick off the Saturday session with and extended presentation on the long-term future of the financial markets, to be followed by an extensive question and answer session. I will be followed by an impressive lineup of market veterans.

The event will be held at the Bellagio Hotel on the Strip, my favorite Las Vegas haunt, best known for its spectacular water fountains out front. You may recognize it in the hit movies The Hangover and Ocean?s Eleven.

General admission costs $499 for the two full days. You can buy a VIP ticket for $699, which includes social events with the high and the mighty. It is all great value for the money, given the quality and quantity of the information you will obtain. Just click here: http://www.optionmonster.com/events/?refId=186 to buy tickets.

Trademonster?s proprietary program, called Heat Seeker ?, monitors no less than 180,000 trades a second to give an early warning of large trades that are about to hit the stock, options, and futures markets. To give you an idea of how much data this is, think of downloading the entire contents of the Library of Congress, about 20 terabytes, every 33 minutes.

The firm maintains a 10 gigabyte per second conduit that transfers data at 6,000 times the speed of a T-1 line, the fastest such pipe in the civilian world. The firm then distills this ocean of data into the top movers of the day, which is put up for free on its website, and offers much more detailed analysis through a premium subscription product.

?As with the NFL,? says Jon, ?you can?t defend against speed.?

The system catches big hedge funds, pension funds, and mutual funds shifting large positions, giving subscribers a peak at the bullish or bearish tilt of the market. It also offers accurate predictions of imminent moves in single stock and index volatility.

Jon started his career as a linebacker for the Chicago Bears, and I can personally attest that he still has a handshake that?s like a steel vice grip. Maybe it was his brute strength that enabled him to work as pit trader on the Chicago Board of Options Exchange for 22 years, where he was known by his floor call letters of ?DRJ.? He formed Mercury Trading in 1989 and then sold it to the mega hedge fund, Citadel, in 2004.

Jon developed his patented algorithms for Heat Seeker? with his brother Pete, another NFL player (Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Minnesota Vikings), who like Jon, is a regular face in the financial media.

June is a great time to visit Sin City, as the crowds are largely gone and the sun is wonderfully baking hot. You can ride the neck-breaking roller coaster at the New York New York Hotel, catch one of eight Cirque du Soleil shows, and ride a gondola at the Venetian Hotel.

Or you can try to get a great deal on a luxury item from my buddy, Rick Harrison, at the famous Gold and Silver Pawn, of Pawn Stars fame (good luck with that!).

Just be sure to bring extra sun tan lotion!

One of the constant challenges in living in the San Francisco Bay Area is figuring out all of the new business models that you have thrown at you on a daily basis.

I can tap on an icon on my iPhone, and two minutes later a taxi shows up (Uber). Another app downloads books on my favorite topics straight into my phone so I can listen to them while hiking (Audible). And heaven help you if you try to make a dinner reservation without first going online and checking out the restaurant (Yelp).

So I felt challenged when I received an email from a family friend the other day. A teacher in nearby Oakland, California was resorting to crowd funding to buy 140 books for her sixth grade class. She needed $965. Could I contribute towards the cause? Even $1.00 would help.

Intrigued, I clicked on the following link for?Donors Choose?at
http://www.donorschoose.org/project/bring-culture-to-my-classroom-through-a/1180380/?utm_source=dc&utm_medium=proposal&utm_campaign=copyURL&rf=copyURL_siteshare_2014_04_teacherid_1534521?, and my eyes opened up. This is a new, revolutionary non-profit organization that vets fundraising efforts for thousands of small classroom projects. Those that can pass the rigorous screening standards are then promoted on the Internet with messages that include a description of the project and a budget.

One of the big worries in funding these kinds of efforts is that the money will get wasted, misused, or stolen. By jumping in as the middleman,?Donors Choose?addresses these concerns through providing due diligence and accountability. You can even read the comments made by the individual donors, which are uplifting, to say the least.

Oakland has one of the toughest school districts in the country. It led the nation in per capita murders last year, 125 out of a population of 500,000. The city government lives constantly on the edge of bankruptcy. Budget cuts have forced major cutbacks in police and fire services.

Elmhurst Community Prep is no piece of cake for a struggling young English teacher. One student from Alliance Academy, the middle school Elmhurst shares its campus with, was murdered in the crossfire of a gang war earlier this year. His older brother was murdered within the same month (see article http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/04/us/oakland-mother-loses-sons/). Many of Elmhurst?s students were close to the student who died and were severely impacted by his loss. It is against this background that Ms. Bronte has to motivate, if not inspire her students to study and raise themselves up to better circumstances.

Bronte chose as a textbook,?When My Name Was Keoko, by Linda Sue Park, a novel set in Korea during its WWII occupation by Japan. Her goal was to show students that there are different worlds and cultures out there totally alien from their own, but still share many of the same problems that we all endure. It also illustrates how young people can rise up from adverse circumstances and prosper.

To her total amazement, the fund raising effort was a blow out success, taking in $965 in three weeks from 18 donors. Half were from family, friends, and past and present teaching colleagues. But the rest were given from total strangers from as far away as the US East Coast. Apparently, there are a lot of people out there surfing the web looking for good causes to help. Donors Choose?serves them up by the boatload.

Corporations are also getting in on the act. Apple, Google, Facebook, and Twitter have all adopted distressed communities around the country, funding hundreds of projects. To get the word out,?Donors Choose?is expanding into social media, in addition to email blasts. Over half of Ms. Bronte?s donors for the project were recruited through Facebook posts that gave information about the project.

Thus emboldened, Elmhurst Community Prep is now shooting for bigger game. It is attempting to raise $10,000 to buy 40 Google Chrome books. If successful, this would provide enough low-end Windows laptops for one roaming laptop cart decked out with its own wireless server.

To participate, you can go to another fund raising website, RALLY.org, by clicking here at?https://rally.org/ecpchromebooks?. This group raises cash for everything from avalanche relief for Sherpa families in Nepal to typhoon reconstruction in the Philippines. They?ve only raised $1,505 for the chrome books so far and have a long ways to go.

I know many of you have made a fortune following my service over the years. Here is a worthy opportunity for some of you to give some back. Peel a Benjamin off your wad and send it in. It will make you feel good! It worked for me!

If charity doesn?t work for you, then consider your own naked self-interest. These are the kids who are going to be working at companies that I have been recommending through my own Trade Alerts. A chronic complaint of these firms is the shortage of local, well trained, quality workers.

Ms. Bronte?s efforts seem to be more than adequately addressing that shortfall.

Needed 160 Textbooks

Now Need 40 Laptops