Global Market Comments
August 2, 2018
Fiat Lux
NETFLIX SPECIAL REPORT
Featured Trade:
(WHAT'S NEXT FOR NETFLIX?),
(NFLX), (WMT), (AMZN)
In its latest earnings report for Q2 2018 Netflix definitely disappointed. Revenues came in at $3.91 billion compared to an expected $3.94 billion. New subscribers came up short 1 million of those expected.
It also provided weaker guidance, expecting to ad only 5 million new subscribers versus an earlier expected 6 million, with most coming from international.
The stock market noticed, taking the shares from $420 down to $330, a loss of 21.42%. Is it time to bail on Reed Hasting's miracle firm? Or is it time to load the boat once again?
If you have any doubts just ask any former employee of Blockbuster. In 1997, Blockbuster was the 800-pound gorilla in the VHS video rental business, with 9,000 worldwide, a 31% market share, and a $5 million market capitalization.
Today, Blockbuster has only one store left somewhere in rural Alaska. There is but one company to blame for this turn of events, and that would be Netflix.
Not only did Blockbuster bite the dust, so did the entire $8 billion-a-year movie rental industry, including Movie Gallery, Hollywood Video, and the rental operations of Walmart (WMT) and Amazon (AMZN).
That year, Reed Hastings returned his rental of the video Apollo 11 a month late and was hit with a huge $40 late charge. He was struck with a bolt of lightning. "There must be a business opportunity here," he thought.
The next day, he and friend Marc Randolph bought an oversized greeting card, tossed the card, and mailed a CD in the remaining envelope to Hastings' house. It arrived the next day in perfect condition. It was a simple matter of geometry. While the CD sat in the middle of the envelope, the Post Office only stamped the corners. This simple experiment became the basis of a business that eventually grew to $186 billion.
Yes, and now you're all thinking, "Why didn't I think of that?"
Hastings was the scion of an East Coast patrician family, a member of the social register and a regular in the New York Times society pages. His great-grandfather, Alfred Lee Loomis, was an early quant who made a fortune.
He received his undergrad degree from Bowdoin College and then joined the Peace Corps. Following a two-year stint in Swaziland to teach math, Hastings then obtained a master's degree in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1988.
Hastings founded his first firm at the age of 30, Pure Software, which went public in 1995. It then merged with Atria Software in 1996 and as Pure Atria was acquired in 1997. That left him flush with cash and looking for new challenges.
Based on the successful mail experiment Hastings invested $2 million into the Netflix idea, which Marc Randolph ran for the first two years.
Netflix then become the lucky beneficiary of a number of sea changes in technology then underway, none of which it anticipated. Sales of DVD players were taking off. The Internet and online commerce were gaining respectability, and massive overinvestment in broadband led to exponential improvements in streaming speeds.
There was also a crucial Supreme Court decision regarding the Copyright Act of 1909 that protected the right to rent a video that you owned. Hollywood had been fighting rentals tooth and nail to protect their substantial profits from DVD sales.
Hastings assembled a team of former colleagues who managed to build a website and a primitive distribution system. The Netflix website went live on April 14, 1998. The site crashed within 90 minutes, overwhelmed by demand. A rushed trip to the nearest Fry's Electronics brought 10 more PCs, which were quickly wired in as servers. By the end of the first day, Netflix had rented 500 videos.
The DVD optical format first launched in March 1997, creating the DVD player industry. Sales reached 400,000 units by the first half of 1998 and prices collapsed, from $1,100 to $580 in the first year. Netflix was swept up in the tide and monthly revenues reached $100,000 within four months.
Since newly released titles were so expensive at $15, Netflix focused on older, niche films in anime, Chinese martial arts, Bollywood movies, and, yes, soft-core porn. Netflix later exited this market when Hastings accepted an appointment to the California State Board of Education.
The company thrived. The headcount rose from an initial three to more than 100. But it was losing money - some $11 million in 1998.
Then the company caught a major break. The French luxury goods tycoon, Bernard Arnault, CEO of LVMH, was desperate to get into the Dotcom Boom and invested $30 million in Netflix. This attracted another $100 million from other venture capitalists and angel investors.
This allowed the company to experiment with its business model. It launched next-day delivery in San Francisco, which proved wildly popular, new sign-ups, renewals, and customer loyalty soared. Then in a stroke of genius Netflix initiated its Marquee Program, which allowed customers to rent four DVDs a month for only $15.95 a month, with no late fees. DVD player sales in 1999 reached 6 million, but Netflix lost $29.8 million that year.
In 2000, the Marquee Program evolved into the Unlimited Movie Rental service and the price rose to $19.95. It included a free rental, which customers could obtain by entering their credit card data, which then renewed indefinitely. This is common now but was considered wildly aggressive in 2000. Netflix was also an early artificial intelligence user, using algorithms to find movies that both members of a couple would like based on past rental data.
Netflix is a company that did 100 things wrong, any one of which could have wiped out the firm. It was the few things it did right that led it to stardom.
Hastings worked out deals with manufacturers to include a free Netflix rental coupon with every DVD player sold. The move earned it valuable market share, but almost bled the company dry since most didn't return. But a labeling error caused hard-core Chinese porn discs to get sent out instead.
A programing glitch caused members' video queues to be sent out all at once, landing some happy subscribers with 300 videos all at once. Coupon counterfeiting was rife until the company began individually coding each one.
Netflix planned to go public in 2000. Existing shareholders rushed to top up their holdings in expectation of cashing in on a first-day pop in the share price. But the Dotcom Crash intervened, and all new tech IPOs were canceled for years. This episode of greed and attempt at insider trading left Netflix well-funded through the following recession. Netflix lost $57.4 million in 2000.
In the meantime, the installed base on DVD players reached 8.6 million by 2002. Then disaster struck. Hastings learned that Amazon was entering the DVD sales market, the only source of Netflix profits. Hastings flew up to Seattle to sell Netflix to Amazon. But Jeff Bezos only offered $12 million and Hastings walked. It was a rare miss for Bezos. DVD players dropped to $200, and demand for content soared.
An important part of the Netflix story was the self-destruction of industry leader Blockbuster. Hastings offered to sell Netflix to Blockbuster at the bargain price of $50 million. By then, Netflix had 300,000 paid subscribers compared to Blockbuster's 50 million. But Blockbuster charged late fees while Netflix didn't. That difference would change the world. However, CEO John Antioco passed believing that online commerce was nothing more than a passing fad. It was a disastrous decision.
To dress up the company's financials for an IPO in 2002, Hastings fired about 40% of the company's workforce to cut costs. On May 23, 2002, Reed Hastings stood on the floor of wealth manager Merrill Lynch as the stock started trading on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol of (NFLX) at $15 a share. The company raised another $82.5 million in the deal. A year later Netflix announced it had 1 million paid subscribers, and the stock soared to $75 and the stock later split 2 for 1.
Realizing his error, Blockbuster's Antioco launched an all-out effort to catch up with Netflix in online rentals. When that news hit the market, (NFLX) shares fell back to its IPO price of $15. Late in 2004, Blockbuster launched a clunky copy of the Netflix website, but without the magical algorithms in the backend that made it work so well. Blockbuster undercut Netflix on price by $2, offering memberships for $17.95. It immediately captured 50% of all new online sign-ups but continued with its notorious late fees.
Blockbuster Online was plagued with software glitches from the start and every day presented a new crisis. Netflix also fought back with its own price cut, to $17.99. Both companies bled money. Short sellers started accumulating big positions in Netflix stock. Hastings vowed to run Blockbuster out of the online market with a $90 a quarter ad spend.
This Netflix received some manna from heaven. Corporate raider Carl Icahn secretly accumulated a chunk of Blockbuster stock in the market and then demanded that the company pursue an asset stripping strategy. Icahn eventually obtained three board seats and became de facto CEO. So, to say that management time was distracted was a gross understatement.
Netflix received another gift when Walmart finally threw in the towel for online movie rentals. Hastings jumped in and did a deal whereby (WMT) would refer all future movie rental customers to Netflix.
Blockbuster finally decided to dump its despised late fees, costing it $400 million in annual revenues. Hundreds of stores were closed to cut costs. The downward spiral began. The value of Blockbuster fell to $684 million. With 4.2 million subscribers Netflix was now worth about $1.5 billion. Blockbuster lost an eye-popping $500 million in 2005.
DVD sales and rentals reached their all-time peak of $27 billion in 2006. Slightly more than 50% of Americans then had broadband access.
Blockbuster, growing weary of the competition from Netflix, finally decided to deliver a knockout blow. It launched its Total Access program in another attempt to bleed Netflix to death by undercutting Netflix's membership price by $2. It worked, and Netflix was facing another near-death experience. Blockbuster Online's share of new subscriptions soared to 70%, and total subscribers soared from 1.5 million to 3.5 million in months. The Netflix share fell to only 17%, and the company was now losing money for the first time in years.
In a last desperate act, Netflix offered to buy Blockbuster Online for $600 billion, and would have gone up to $1 billion just to eliminate the competition. An overconfident Blockbuster, smelling blood, refused. Movie Gallery and Hollywood Video were already on the bankruptcy trail, so why shouldn't Netflix go the same way?
And then the inexplicable happened. Icahn refused to pay Antioco a promised $7 million performance bonus based on the Blockbuster Online success. Instead, he offered only $2 million and Antioco resigned, collecting an $8 million severance bonus in the process. Icahn replaced him with Jim Keyes, the former CEO of 7-Eleven.
Keyes immediately pulled the plug on the Total Access discount, thus dooming Blockbuster Online. Instead, he ordered that the company's 6,000 remaining stores sell Slurpees and pizzas to return to profitability, in effect turning them into 7-Elevens that rented videos. It was one of the worst decisions in business history. Many of the senior staff resigned and sold their stock on hearing this news. Keyes in effect seized defeat from the jaws of victory.
Reinvigorated and with subscriptions soaring once again, Netflix launched headlong in online streaming. It introduced its set top box, Roku, in 2008. It then got Microsoft to offer Netflix streaming through its Xbox 360 game console that Christmas, instantly adding potentially10 million new subscribers.
And this is what makes Netflix Netflix. Although the company had the best recommendation engine in the industry, CineMatch, Hastings thought he could do better. So, in 2006, he offered a $1 million prize to anyone who could improve Cinematch's performance by 10%. To facilitate the competition, he made public the data on 100 million searches carried out by the firm's customers.
It was the largest data set put in the public domain. Some 40,000 teams in 186 countries entered the contest, including the best artificial intelligence and machine language and mathematical minds. It became the most famous scientific challenge of its day.
After a heated three-year struggle, a team named BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos won, a combination of three teams from Bell Labs, Hungary, and Canada. The copyright for the algorithm is owned by AT&T and licensed to Netflix for a fixed annual fee. AT&T also uses the winning algorithm for its own U-verse TV programming.
When the 2008 financial crisis hit, Netflix subscribers just kept on rising at the rate of 10,000 a day as consumers stayed at home and obtained cheaper forms of entertainment. Total subscriptions topped 10 million in 2009. Those at Blockbuster cratered. A new competitor appeared on the scene, Redbox, with 20,000 supermarket kiosks offering DVDs for 99 cents a day. But Netflix was hardly affected.
By 2012, Netflix subscriptions reached 20 million. Streaming was a blowout success, with half of its customers using streaming only to watch TV shows and movies. Hollywood beat a path to Hastings' door, with Paramount Pictures, Lionsgate, and MGM earning a collective $800 million in Netflix fees. Netflix now accounted for 60% of movies streamed and 20% of total broadband usage.
When Blockbuster finally declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy on September 23, 2010, so did its Canadian operations. That opened the way for Netflix to enter the international market, picking up 1 million new subscribers practically overnight. Next it launched into Latin America, introducing Spanish and Portuguese streaming in 43 countries.
As streaming replaced DVD rental by mail, Hastings attempted to spin off the rump of the business into a firm called Quickster. Customers would now have to open two accounts, one for streaming and one for mail and pay high prices. Customers and shareholders rebelled, taking the stock from $305 down to a heartbreaking $60. This was the last chance you could buy the stock at a decent price.
Hastings recanted on Quickster and let go the 200 staff applied to the unit. Icahn made a reappearance in this story, this time accumulating a 10% share in Netflix. After demanding management changes nothing happened, and Icahn eventually sold his shares for a large profit. Finally, Icahn made money in the video business.
Going forward, Netflix's strategy is finally straightforward. Create a virtuous circle whereby superior content attracts new subscribers, who then deliver the money for better content.
CineMatch knows more about what you want to watch than you do. The immense data it is generating gives Netflix not only the insight on how to sell you the next movie, it also proves unmatched insight into trends in the industry as a whole. It also makes Netflix unassailable in the movie industry.
That has given the firm the confidence to double its original content budget from $4 billion to $8 billion this year to produce Emmy-winning series such as House of Cards and Orange is the New Black.
So, the future for Netflix looks bright. As for me, I think I'll spend the rest of the evening watching the 1931 version of Frankenstein on Netflix.
Global Market Comments
August 1, 2018
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(REPORT FROM THE MATTERHORN SUMMIT)
From where I stand, the rolling foothills of Northern Italy spread out below me to the south.
On my left lie the distinctive peaks of the Dolomites. On my right I can see the massive expanse of Mont Blanc, at 15,781 feet the highest mountain in Europe.
I am standing at the summit of the Matterhorn. Knock another item off the bucket list.
I have been trying to climb this mountain for 45 years. During my early attempts I possessed the physical conditioning, but not the money to acquire the necessary equipment needed to get to the top.
An ice ax, crampons, helmet, and ropes don't come cheap to a 16-year-old.
In later years, vile weather frustrated my every attempt. Now the forecast was perfect, and the sun, the moon, and the stars aligned.
The Matterhorn has long been the premier climbing challenge on the continent. My doctor in Zermatt heads up many rescues and tells me that a dozen people a year die trying. The year 1999 was especially bad, claiming 39 lives.
Still, if death isn't on the table, it's not worth doing.
I spent a restless night sleeping under a heavy wool blanket in a shared bunk with a dozen other climbers at the 10,695-foot Hornli Hut. Get a group of guys like this together, and there is always one who snores.
At 3:00 AM we bolted out of bed to eat a hardy breakfast of eggs, cold cuts, and lots of strong coffee before launching an assault on the mountain.
We then quietly filled canteens and donned climbing harnesses and backpacks. The night sky was crystal clear, an ocean of stars shimmering upon us, with the occasional shooting star giving its blessing.
I had spent the past week acclimatizing myself to the high altitude, completing practice climbs to the top of increasingly difficult surrounding peaks. I was joined by my Swiss guide, Christian, of the Zermatt Alpin Center.
In his mid-40s, chocolate tanned, with thighs like tree stumps, he had already climbed the Matterhorn an impressive 77 times.
We took off at a rapid pace, passing most of the early starters. Zermatt guides are notorious for speed climbing, the theory being that the quicker they wore out their clients, the sooner they could go home.
I realized there was something far more responsible going on. Christian had to gain the confidence that I had enough energy reserves left for the descent, when 90% of all fatalities occur. At 11,800 feet he said, "Good," and we roped up.
It was about this time that I started to wonder if I should really be here. Most of the climbers we were passing were in their 20s and a few in their 30s, old enough to be my grandchildren.
After all, I'm the silver-haired gentleman people give their seat up to when riding the San Francisco BART. At 12,200 feet Christian ordered, "Now we put on our crampons."
From there on we silently pushed our way upward in the darkness, headlamps illuminating the way, methodically positioning our feet to make the leap to the next boulder above.
The mountain has been climbed for 151 years and many of the surfaces have been polished smooth by boots to the point of becoming dangerously slippery, especially when wet.
Much of the slope is frustratingly unstable. Half the rocks you reach for are loose. Stones sent flying by climbers above are a major risk, which is why we wear helmets.
By 5:00 AM we were at 12,700 feet and the sun started to rise. I took out my camera to take a picture, but fumbling with my climbing gloves, I dropped it. It smashed into a dozen pieces on a huge boulder and then skittered down into the great Matterhorn crevasse below.
I still had my iPhone to take pictures. But it's touch screen required me to take my glove off. With the temperature at 10 degrees below freezing, photos were not worth risking fingers to frostbite. So, you'll just have to read about it.
During the first half of the 19th century, the Matterhorn was the Holy Grail among climbers, and was considered impossible to conquer. Englishman Edward Whymper finally led a seven-man team to the top in 1865. He pioneered the same Hornli Ridge route that I was ascending today.
But on the way down a rope broke and four perished. One body was never found. Today, you can see the rope in a Zermatt museum, a crude manila affair, along with the clothes from another dead climber found months later.
Some 5,000 now attempt the climb every year, and about 500 make it to the summit. Ulrich Inderbinen made the top more than 370 times and last climbed it when he was 90. I was able to shake his hand at a picture signing in Zermatt a couple of years before he died from old age at 103 (click here for his obituary).
At 13,000 feet we approached the Moseley slab, so named for an American who fell to his death here in 1879. Beyond beckoned the Solvay Hut, a tiny, precariously sited rescue from weather that suddenly turns bad.
Taking a break, I found, amazingly, that I still had cell phone reception. Should I send out a Trade Alert from 13,133 feet?
That was where I encountered my first zombie, a climber who grievously underestimated the mountain and had used up every ounce of energy to get this far. His guide was coaxing, shouting and cajoling him to climb down one rock at a time.
Looking at his dead eyes, you know it was going to be a tough and dangerous descent. I later heard that the poor fellow, Japanese, fell and broke his leg and had to be helicoptered off.
There were many more zombies to come.
Above Solvay, we encountered the "fixed ropes," which are actually steel cables bolted to the face to help traverse the steepest and most dangerous passages. Lose your grip here, and its 3,000 feet straight down.
This is where we ran into the traffic jam, with simultaneous ascending and descending climbers competing for the same handholds. One dummy actually abseiled down on top of me, nearly knocking me off of my grip. Here, falling climbers are a major danger.
At 300 feet below the summit I passed Sophie's Ridge, so named for a young Italian woman who was turned back in the 1880's because high winds were embarrassingly blowing her Victorian ankle-length dress above her waist.
Now, altitude sickness was taking its toll, with many puking climbers turning back, the disappointment showing on their faces. Luckily, I felt fine.
Not far from there was the location of the original 1865 accident. Then we approached the small bronze statue of Saint Bernard, the patron saint of mountain climbers.
Bolted to the side of the peak, it was covered with ropes, as many teams tie on to it to rappel down.
Then we were on top. The weather was glorious. The summit was graced with a wrought iron cross that one finds atop many Alpine peaks. There was an impatient line of climbers waiting their turn to tag the summit, take some quick pictures, pick up a rock, and then start their way down.
The feeling of accomplishment was immense.
We carefully picked our way down, rappelling down the steepest faces. By now the sun was well up, the ice was melting, freeing up infinitely more loose rubble. One boulder the size of a small car crashed down 50 feet away, making a thunderous roar.
"Yikes," I thought. "We better get out of here."
At 13,000 feet, we encountered a team with one climber absolutely paralyzed with fear and refusing to budge. After some discussion, I agreed to let her rope up with us and escort her down to the Hornli Hut. The other guide was Christian's friend, and that would enable him to continue upward with his other clients. Our expedition turned into a mountain rescue.
Once Christian tied her in, I had second thoughts about being so charitable. If she fell, she could take me with her. Christian then convinced me he could hold both of us with a belay. We then encouraged her down the mountain one step at a time. I went through my entire repertoire of German jokes, which is rather short.
I learned that she sold toilets on behalf of a Swiss plumbing company for a living, and that until today had never done anything more serious than a day hike out of Lausanne.
All of her equipment was brand new. Part of the problem was that she had failed to don her crampons, which we found in her backpack, untouched in its original packaging.
Back at the Hornli Hut I was dog tired. Our impromptu guest suddenly fell to the ground and burst into tears. She then bought us both a celebratory liter of beer each. I was dying of thirst, as I had done the entire climb on just two quarts of water to save weight.
It had been the hardest day of my life and after 15 minutes at the table I couldn't move. The $1,200 investment in Christian had been well spent. He departed for Zermatt to pick up his next client.
I elected to spend a second night at Hornli and complete the 3,000-foot-hike down to Schwarzsee the next day. From there I was taking the gondola down. Nothing left to prove here. The second time, I slept like a rock.
It is traditional for successful climbers to pick up a stone at the summit and deposit it on a giant cairn at the beginning of the trail at 7,000 feet. Some of these weigh more than 50 pounds, a macho display of strength and endurance. When I made my contribution, a small pebble the size of a quarter, I made sure no one was looking.
I now have an empty place on my bucket list. What will replace it? I hear that Africa's 19,341-foot Mount Kilimanjaro is pretty easy.
Life is good.
Climbing One Step at a Time
Only 4,000 Feet to Go
Halfway and All Is Good
The Traffic Jam
The Summit
A Mountain Rescue
Take That Item off the Bucket List
"This is very bullish for markets. It's bullish for markets intermediate term. Before, I thought we were in the seventh inning of a four-year bull market. Two waiters just came in and delivered another punch bowl. We're going into extra innings, baby," said Stanley Druckenmiller formerly of hedge fund Duquesne Capital Management, about the Fed's decision not to taper.
Global Market Comments
July 31, 2018
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(LAST CHANCE TO ATTEND THE FRIDAY, AUGUST 3
AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS GLOBAL STRATEGY DINNER),
(THE INSIDER'S VIEW ON THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY),
(AMZN), (GOOG), (DELL), (MSFT), (EBAY),
(MY DATE WITH HITLER'S GIRLFRIEND)
Come join John Thomas at the Mad Hedge Fund Trader's Global Strategy Dinner, which I will be conducting in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, on Friday, August 3, 2018 at 7:00 PM. A three-course dinner will be followed by an extended question-and-answer period.
I'll be giving you my up-to-date view on stocks, bonds, foreign currencies, commodities, precious metals, energy, and real estate. And to keep you in suspense, I'll be throwing a few surprises out there, too. Tickets are available for $229.
The dinner will be held at a downtown Amsterdam hotel near The Dam, and the location will be on the "Thank You" screen after your purchase.
I look forward to meeting you and thank you for supporting my research.
To purchase tickets, please click here.
Global Market Comments
July 30, 2018
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(THE MARKET OUTLOOK FOR THE WEEK AHEAD,
or POURING GASOLINE ON THE FIRE),
(MSFT), (AMZN), (FB), (NFLX), (TWTR),
(TESTIMONIAL)
Pour gasoline on a fire and you get a reaction. It's a simple matter of physics. That is the natural result of hitting the economy with tax cuts, fiscal stimulus, and low interest rates all at once. But at what price?
Of course, the headline number of the week was the first read on Q2 GDP growth, which came in at a strong 4.1%, the hottest number in four years. What was one of the biggest contributors? Soybean sales, as buyers rushed to beat the imposition of retaliatory Chinese tariffs. Consumers also hit the stores hard, spending their rising by a robust 4%.
The big question now is how much of this is sustainable? The answer is probably not much, which leaves investors with the queasy feeling that by coming in now they risk buying the absolute peak in the stock market. By temporarily pulling forward so much growth you may be creating a growth hole in Q3. So better mark your calendars now.
Q2 almost always delivers a string rebound from a usually weak Q1. The tax cuts delivered a one-time-only boost. But the investment spending that the administration had hoped for hasn't materialized, with a disproportionate portion of corporate profits going into share buybacks instead. Inventories are rising sharply, which is always bad.
We'll know for sure in a year when a recession will most likely begin. And remember, this extra growth is at the expense of an increase in the national debt by 10%, from $21 trillion to $23 trillion. And that is definitely NOT sustainable, but everyone in the world seems to have forgotten that, except me!
Interestingly, the report placed the current inflation rate dead on the Fed's target at 2.0%. That is a guarantee that any continued economic strength will be offset by rising interest rates.
The Facebook (FB) earnings highlighted the poor risk/reward of buying tech stocks at these elevated levels. Facebook shares plunged by 20% on their earnings announcement, creating the largest single day loss of market capitalization in history, some $120 billion. It was obviously a "kitchen sink" quarter.
If you get an earnings beat, as you did with Microsoft (MSFT) and Amazon (AMZN), you get a 2-, 3-, 4% pop in the stock price. If you disappoint, as did Facebook, Netflix (NFLX), and Twitter (TWTR), they crater by 10% to 20%. It is all typical end-of-cycle price action.
On the other hand, Amazon knocked the cover off the ball with its earnings, which came in at double analyst forecasts. The company is about to reach my end 2018 target of $2,000 a share. That is double the February lows.
Amazon Web Services delivered a stunning $6.1 billion quarterly revenue, up 49% YOY. Advertising is now becoming a major factor, as the company challenges Google (GOOG) and Facebook. For more on the longer-term prospects of Jeff Bezos's incredible company please see the special report that I published yesterday.
Bonds (TLT) continued their moribund price action, barely eking out a gain in yields to 2.97%. Either they are already discounting the next recession, are flooded with cash from a global QE hangover, or are getting a nice flight to safety bid brought on by multiple trade wars. Most likely it is all three.
Better to opine from the sidelines than to attempt to trade in the least volatile bond market conditions in 30 years.
As for gold, it continues to be a trader's worst nightmare as it plums new 2018 lows. Clearly, globally rising interest rates are not of what bull markets in gold are made. It doesn't help that Venezuela continues to hammer the market by liquidating its entire gold reserves on its way to national bankruptcy. Whenever distress liquidations take place, they are bad for everyone, not just the seller. Competition from crypto currencies for the speculative dollar doesn't help either.
As I have been sitting on top of an Alp contemplating the future and out of the markets, my 2018 year-to-date performance remains unchanged at an eye-popping 24.82% and my 8 1/2- year return sits at 301.29%. The Averaged Annualized Return stands at 35.10%. The more narrowly focused Mad Hedge Technology Fund Trade Alert performance is annualizing now at an impressive 38.69%.
It will be a big week on the data front, with an FOMC Meeting and an onslaught of jobs data.
On Monday, July 30 at 10:00 AM we obtain the June Pending Home Sales.
On Tuesday, July 31 at 9:00 AM EST, then we get the May S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller National Home Price Index.
On Wednesday, August 1 at 2:00 PM, the Fed announces its decision on interest rates. Given the hot 4.1% Q2 GDP report, another 25-basis point rate rise is entirely possible.
Thursday, August 2, leads with the Weekly Jobless Claims at 8:30 AM EST, which saw a rise of 9,000 last week to 219,000.
On Friday, August 3 at 9:15 AM EST we get the July Nonfarm Payroll Report. Then the Baker Hughes Rig Count is announced at 1:00 PM EST.
As for me, the highlight of the week was being handed the keys to the City of Zermatt by the mayor for visiting for the 50th year. Yes, I camped out here at the Youth Hostel in 1968. Also, with the honor came a Swiss Army knife with my name on it and a beautiful 10-pound coffee table book outlining the route I usually take to the Matterhorn summit.
I am now contemplating my return to the U.S., which is always hellish. It will require two trains (to Visp and Geneva), two flights (to Amsterdam and San Francisco), the last one of which lasts a punishing 10 1/2 hours. Then there is the eight hours of jet lag to deal with when I get home. So, I'll be getting up at 2:00 AM for a while. During those days I will be posting some of my favorite pieces from the past.
Still, to see the 14,692-foot Matterhorn from where I am sitting in the brilliant sunshine in all its glory, listening to an Alpine river rushing outside my window, and watching the swaying pines, it is all worth it.
Good luck and good trading.
Global Market Comments
July 27, 2018
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(LAST CHANCE TO ATTEND THE FRIDAY, AUGUST 3, 2018,
AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS GLOBAL STRATEGY DINNER),
(STOCKS TO BUY ON THE OUTBREAK OF TRADE PEACE),
(QQQ), (SPY), (SOYB), (CORN), (WEAT), (CAT),
(DE), (BA), (QCOM), (MU), (LRCX), (CRUS),
(ORIENT EXPRESS PART II, or REPORT FROM VENICE)
