Global Market Comments
April 7, 2015
Fiat Lux
SPECIAL IRAN ISSUE
Featured Trade:
(CHICAGO FRIDAY, APRIL 30 GLOBAL STRAGEGY LUNCHEON),
(IRAN PEACE DEAL BRINGS ON THE PAX AMERICANA),
(USO)
United States Oil ETF (USO)
Global Market Comments
April 7, 2015
Fiat Lux
SPECIAL IRAN ISSUE
Featured Trade:
(CHICAGO FRIDAY, APRIL 30 GLOBAL STRAGEGY LUNCHEON),
(IRAN PEACE DEAL BRINGS ON THE PAX AMERICANA),
(USO)
United States Oil ETF (USO)
The peace deal with Iran is worth a stock market double and maybe more.
Add that to the double we already deserve from a cheap long-term price of energy, and it is clear that stock prices have a long ways to go on the upside from here.
The Iranian peace deal is a hugely pro global growth, pro risk development, which I have been forecasting for years.
Bring on the Pax Americana, whereby the United States no longer faces any industrial strength adversary anywhere in the world for decades to come.
That is why I have been adding to what is already a precariously bullish position in the Mad Hedge Fund Trader?s model trading portfolio, which by the way, us up an impressive 12.67% so far in 2015. Hold on to your hats, because there are still more Trade Alerts in the works to come.
New all time highs for the service are a hair?s breadth away.
After discussing the finer print of the agreement with my many friends at the State Department, the Joint Chiefs, the CIA, and Israeli Intelligence, it is a miracle that this deal got done at all.
Pouring molasses in the works were direct communications between the Republican Party and the far right in Iran, both of which have absolutely no interest in a peace deal getting done.
This led to an event almost ludicrous in the annals of international diplomacy, where moderate Iranians lectured American conservatives on the finer points of US constitutional law, and the Persians were proffering the correct view.
Christian and Islamic Fundamentalists working hand in hand? Go figure!
I?ll break down the major talking points, and their consequences. I will also draw where I can from my own knowledge of nuclear weapon construction, which I picked up while working at the Atomic Energy Commission?s nuclear test site in Nevada 45 years ago. Not much has changed since then, although it has been a while since I have heard ?nuke them till they die!?
Sanctions
Iran won?t see positive economic consequences from the deal until well into 2016. That?s because they first have to destroy 14,000 centrifuges in full public view, from 19,000 down to 5,000. The Iranians see this as a big win because the US initially demanded only 1,000 centrifuges.
Iran also has to cut its uranium stockpiles to a fraction of its current inventory, another big job. The US has offered to purchase the excess uranium at market prices to fuel its own power plants.
Not until then will only the economic and financial sanctions be lifted, not the military ones. Remember Iran still possesses a ton of US military hardware purchased by the late Shah at inflated prices (to account for the bribes), which is in desperate need of spare parts.
Those waiting anxiously for another crash in the price of oil may have to sit on their hands for a while, as it will take this long for the new Iranian crude to hit the market.
Uranium Enrichment
Iran is permitted to enrich uranium to only 3.67%, enough to run an electric power plant, but far below bomb grade 90% purity.
This deal has a ten-year maturity on enrichment. What happens after that will be subject to the next round of negotiations. The future of the deep underground research facility at Fordow is still up in the air.
However, if Iran falls out of compliance for any reason, the US could destroy this facility at any time with a single, recently upgraded bunker buster bomb. The Iranians know this.
Plutonium
This element is crucial for the development of any large atomic bombs. Iran has agreed to destroy its reactor at Arak used to produce it, setting them back several years. All heavy water (2H2O) used to run the reactor will be sold on the open market.
Inspections
They are going to get the full proctological level of international inspection. The hot stuff is not hard to find. You can see it from a satellite that is already permanently stationed overhead.
Third party international inspectors will get unrestricted access to the entire nuclear supply chain, from the uranium mines to the storage of the enriched end product. These intrusive inspections will continue for 25 years.
What Could Go Wrong?
Many things.
Domestic backlashes in either the US or Iran could easily torpedo the deal. In that case, the financial markets would quickly give back any rallies achieved so far.
Goodbye Dow 20,000!
Representatives from both sides are already making conflicting representations to their own people on what exactly has been agreed to in Geneva.
Iran has the tougher sell, to the powerful Revolutionary Guards, which are currently making a fortune from the black market that the sanctions created. No sanctions means no pay, and therefore, no play.
The Republican Party will do whatever they can to demolish an agreement, and all 16 presidential candidates have already come out strongly against it. The Republican controlled congress will certain refuse to lift sanctions, even if a final agreement is signed.
This is meaningless, as the European sanctions will be gone, where Iran conducts most of its international trade anyway. In the end, US big business will force congress to cave, lest they lose out on the immense profits about to be made in Iran.
The country has suffered from 40 years of woeful underinvestment in its oil and gas industry, and guess who the most competitive provider of that is (think yellow roses, Astros).
If the US doesn?t agree to the deal, it is likely that Europe would make the move without us, leaving America twisting in the wind. In any case, the US has the most aggressive weapons monitoring infrastructure, run by old friends of mine out of Los Alamos, New Mexico. (Hey John, call me!). So, our participation is crucial.
Also, if there is no deal, Iran would probably have a bomb in a year anyway. After all, sanctions didn?t prevent them from boosting their number of centrifuges from 300 to 19,000 over the last 15 years.
The reality is that the government in Tehran has probably done the math and found that a weapon they would probably never use anyway was not worth keeping the country in a permanent depression with dramatically falling standards of living.
The lesson here is that economic sanctions work, if you are willing to wait long enough.
For More depth on the long term global economic and financial implications of the peace deal with Iran, please read my recent piece ?Here Comes the Next Peace Dividend? by clicking here.
By the way, in this piece I predicted years ago that such an earth shaking development would crash the price from $100 to $30 a barrel and it looks like that is exactly what we are going to get.
Global Market Comments
April 6, 2015
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(FRIDAY, MAY 15 SAN FRANCISCO STRATEGY LUNCHEON)
(THE BIG MILESTONE FOR SOLAR),
(TAN), (SCTY), (SPWR), (FSLR),
(THE CHINA VIEW FROM 30,000 FEET),
(FXI), (BABA), (DBC), (DYY), (DBA), (PHO),
(TESTIMONIAL)
Guggenheim Solar ETF (TAN)
SolarCity Corporation (SCTY)
SunPower Corporation (SPWR)
First Solar, Inc. (FSLR)
iShares China Large-Cap (FXI)
Alibaba Group Holding Limited (BABA)
PowerShares DB Commodity Tracking ETF (DBC)
DB Commodity Double Long ETN (DYY)
PowerShares DB Agriculture ETF (DBA)
PowerShares Water Resources ETF (PHO)
I am writing this to you from a dive boat headed for the Molokini Crater off the coast of Maui in Hawaii. The rolling of the boat makes typing challenging, so please excuse me for more than the usual number of typos.
In the distance farmers are burning off their harvested cane fields, creating giant plumes of smoke, a practice banned in the continental US decades ago.
A pod of dolphins are racing the bow of the boat and humpback whales are blowing their spouts on the horizon. Periodically, the boat scares up a school of flying fish going airborne to find safety.
Life is good.
Another thing I have noticed cruising off the Maui leeward coast is that almost every building has solar roof panels. Of course, the incentive here is huge, as costly imported fuel for power plants makes electricity in Hawaii 20%-50% more expensive than it is on the mainland.
By now, you probably are sick to death of my banging on about the fantastic investment opportunities in the solar industry. But I am not recommending the sector because I wear Birkenstocks, eat organic bean sprouts and recycle even my vegetable waste. Putting money into solar now also makes solid business sense.
Did I also mention that it prevents millions of tons of carbon from entering the atmosphere, or about 5 tons per household per year?
With the stocks expected to rise by ten times over the next decade, you better get ready for more abuse. The solar industry is about to cross an epochal, sea changing benchmark.
Thanks in part to heavy competition from China, South Korea and Japan, the cost of solar panels has collapsed by 75% over the past four years.
Indeed, Chinese flooding of the US market with cheap imported panels almost wiped out every American producer. If you don?t believe me, then check out the long-term stock charts.
More importantly, the cost of industrial, utility sized solar power plants has fallen by 50%.
Only four years ago, large solar power plants made economic sense only after heavy government subsidies were included. They were all part of a ?stimulate the economy and save the world? philosophy demanded by the global economic collapse.
Now we are about to attain the Holy Grail: solar that is profitable on a stand-alone basis.
Don?t get me wrong. Subsidies are nice, as the oil and gas industry well know. I have been sidling up to the trough myself lately with my own solar projects (more on that in a future research piece). But subsidies are no longer the lifeblood of the business.
The economics of solar roof installations are now so compelling, that they are going up everywhere across the country. In fact, everyone on my street has one except me.
That is because the technology, which I keep close track of, is evolving so quickly that it has paid to wait. I did the same when I skipped six track tapes and waited for eight tracks ones, ignored Betamax in favor of VHS, and passed on Windows 1 (which always froze), but soaked up Windows 2.
A solar installation now also protects you from the hefty price increases that will be demanded by your local utility to pay for long overdue infrastructure upgrades.
I am also holding out for the best possible deal (you know me). With one Tesla Model S in the garage, and a Model X on order, I also happen to be one of the largest residential electric power consumers in the state. So, we?re not talking small beer here.
This is starting to have a sizeable impact on the American electricity market. A reader who works for Southern California Edison (SCE/PF) has told me that the cumulative effect of millions of home silicon roof panels is now so great that the traditional daily afternoon power demand spike is starting to disappear.
Even Saudi Arabia is building solar plants now, and they have access to nearly unlimited crude at a mere $5 a barrel.
The Spanish engineering company TSK has just signed a contract with Dubai to build a sizeable, state of the art 100-megawatt photovoltaic plant. The production costs there will work out to just $5.85 a kilowatt hour.
For oil to be competitive with this capital cost, the price would have to stay under $50 a barrel for the next 20 years. Technological advances on stream will make solar competitive at $20 a barrel in a year or two. This explains why some $2.7 billion worth of solar contracts with the Middle East are currently in negotiation.
Oil poor states are rushing even faster to the solar panacea. Jordan is planning to obtain 20% of its power from alternative sources by 2020, while Egypt has set a more ambitious 20% target. Morocco, which I will be visiting this summer, is the most aggressive, with an impressive 42% goal.
All of the means dramatically falling costs and soaring revenue for the solar companies. That sounds like a great business plan to me.
The usual suspects here include First Solar (FSLR), at $11 billion, the largest capitalized behemoth in the industry, and the master of thin film technology. Their power plant near Las Vegas is a sight to behold from the air.
There is Solar City (SCTY), Elon Musk?s highly competitive entry in the field, which will be able to draw from Tesla?s massive $6 billion giga factory in Reno, Nevada.
Sunpower (SPWR) is the Rolls Royce of the solar industry, producing the highest efficiency rated 340-watt panels (thanks to the pure copper substrate), which I will soon be installing in my own home. Love that biochemistry degree!
You could also go risk averse and buy all of them through the Guggenheim Solar ETF (TAN).
The key here is the price of oil, which has unnecessarily dragged down the shares of solar companies over the past nine months. Once it bottoms, if it has not already done so, it will be off to the races.
While your big cap oil majors might add on 40% in value in any recovery, the solars could be in for a tenfold return.
Back to me whale watching. Thar she blows!
Global Market Comments
April 2, 2015
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(FRIDAY, APRIL 17 INCLINE VILLAGE, NEVADA STRATEGY LUNCHEON)
(AN UPGRADE FOR THE TESLA SUPERCHARGER NETWORK),
(TSLA),
(NOTICE TO MILITARY SUBSCRIBERS)
Tesla Motors, Inc. (TSLA)
Global Market Comments
April 1, 2015
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(LAS VEGAS WEDNESDAY MAY 8 GLOBAL STRAGEGY LUNCHEON)
(GET READY TO LOAD THE BOAT WITH HOMEBUILDERS),
(LEN), (KBH), (PHM), (DHI), (IYR)
Lennar Corp. (LEN)
KB Home (KBH)
PulteGroup, Inc. (PHM)
DR Horton Inc. (DHI)
iShares US Real Estate (IYR)
I am writing this to you from Terminal 3 at San Francisco airport, awaiting my flight to Honolulu, Hawaii.
The pilot strides by quickly and purposefully, and I?m wondering if I should stop him for a brief pilot to pilot chat.
How are you feeling? Are you satisfied with your life?
Are you feeling depressed at all?
Hey, did you hear the one about the chicken that crossed the road...?
Two guys walk into a bar, and there?s a duck sitting on a barstool...?
Did you know that the three most often told lies are ?the check is in the mail?, ?I?ll get back to you? and ??
A Protestant, a Catholic and a Jew are sitting next to each other when the engine fails?
My kids quickly talk me out of the idea. They convince me that if I did make it to Hawaii, I probably would only get as far as the Federal Detention Facility in Honolulu. This must be the only family in the world where the kids have to ask the dad to exercise discretion.
But I digress.
No, this is not some kind of April Fool.
You would think that homebuilders would be the worst place in the world to invest right after the biggest bond bull market in history is ending, and interest rates are going to rise.
Not so.
In fact, homebuilders are the current number one pick of Bill Miller, the legendary stock picker at fund manager Legg Mason. He argues strongly that it will be the easiest place to make money in the market for the rest of the decade, with the stocks doubling or more from current levels.
I like the sound of this.
Bill argues that there is a 500,000-unit deficit in homebuilding industry capacity compared to market demand. It trades at a 25% discount to the S&P 500 earnings multiple of 17X. He expects profit growth to run at a 20% annual rate for the next 3-5 years.
And let?s face it. The data out of the real estate industry in February was nothing less that blockbuster. February new home sales were up a red hot 7.8% and January was revised up to a smoking 4%. February pending home sales clocked 6.1% and 12% year on year.
When you see an entire data range catch fire like this, it becomes highly convincing.
This rocketing demand is occurring in the face of shrinking supply. There are now only 1.8 million existing homes on the market in the United States, a 4.6 month supply, close to an historic low. Real estate agents are clamoring for new supply, but the builders are taking their own sweet time.
After a quiescent 2014, home prices in America have started to rise once again.
You would think that anyone going into the homebuilders just as interest rates are starting to increase has a hole in their head. But look at the correlation between rates and homebuilder share prices, and the opposite is true.
When prices began their meteoric rise last year, culminating in an eye popping 1.62% yield on ten year Treasury bonds (TLT) in January, homebuilder stocks looked liked they had Montezuma?s revenge.
Now that rates have backed off, and the Fed has been rattling its saber for more interest rate rises (goodbye ?patience?), the sector has been on fire.
The reason is that the Fed will raise rates only if they see inflation coming. This would be fantastic news for the entire real estate industry, the most reliable inflation hedge out there for the individual investor.
Having your inventory appreciate in value through no effort of your own is also about the best thing that can happen to any developer.
The key to understanding these stocks is that this is not you father?s real estate industry.
Absolutely no one competes for market share anymore. Companies are constructing only enough homes they are certain to sell at high margins. They?re also getting cagier on land acquisition costs.
Hence the shortage.
Look no further than Lennar (LEN). At the top of the last housing cycle in 2005, they built 53,000 houses. In 2015, they will construct only 25,000, but will earn a far greater profit margin on them.
Those firms that reached for market share with leverage were wiped out by the great cleansing of the 2008 crash, or were taken over for pennies on the dollar.
Mind you, the industry still has major challenges. The entry-level buyer is missing in action, as millions of students buckle under crushing debt loads. Some 10% of all homeowners representing 5.4 million units are still underwater on their mortgages, blocking trade ups.
These factors alone explained the market?s and the homebuilder shares lack of sizzle in 2014.
But longer term, the outlook is fantastic.
My ?Golden Age? scenario for the 2020?s makes the homebuilders an absolute sweet spot to be in. A demographic shortfall will make workers scarce, lead to rising wages, and at long last bring a return of inflation. It is a perfect storm for rising home prices.
Could the market already be starting to discount the great things to come in the next decade?
In addition to (LEN), the usual suspects in this sector include Pulte Homes (PHM), KB Homes (KBH), the old Kaufman & Broad (who sold out right at the top) and DR Horton (DHI). You can also contemplate the Real Estate iShares ETF (IYR).
Global Market Comments
March 31, 2015
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(WEDNESDAY APRIL 1 GLOBAL STRATEGY WEBINAR),
(ENTERING THE QUIET TIME),
(SPY), (IWM), (QQQ), (IJR), (GS), (FXE),
(CHINA?S COMING DEMOGRAPHIC NIGHTMARE)
SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY)
iShares Russell 2000 (IWM)
PowerShares QQQ Trust, Ser 1 (QQQ)
iShares Core S&P Small-Cap (IJR)
The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. (GS)
CurrencyShares Euro ETF (FXE)
I?ll let you in on my top secret investment strategy that has brought me blockbuster results over the past six years.
Listen to the Wharton Business School?s professor, Jeremy Siegel.
The good doctor has been unremittingly bullish year in and year out, nearly pegging the stock index performance annually.
So, when he says that the Dow Average is going to rise to 20,000 by the end of 2015, that?s good enough for me. In fact Siegel thinks that at current price earnings multiple of 17 times, the bull market has years to run.
It would not be until we hit nosebleed levels of 25X or 30X earnings that he would get worried. And the current ultra low level of interest might even make these high multiple numbers justifiable.
So for the foreseeable future, we are going to see long periods of tedious range trading, followed by frenetic rounds of buying, once the market decides that it is time to discount the next rise in corporate earnings.
We happen to be in one of those range-trading periods right now, which my partner, Mad Day Trader Jim Parker, thinks could last all the way until September.
Actually, it is a little more complicated than that.
There is good reason for the stock market to go to sleep over the next two weeks.
Do you hear that great sucking sound? That is the noise of 170 million tax payers writing checks to the US Internal Revenue Service.
Foreign readers may not realize this, but tax payments are due in the United States on April 15 every year. I would ask for your sympathy, but I know all of you pay far more in taxes than we do. I know, because I used to pay them myself when I lived abroad for 23 years.
Of the $6 trillion in revenues from all sources due to Uncle Sam in 2015, 37%, or $2.2 trillion will come in the form of individual income taxes. That is a big hit for the financial system. That means for the next two weeks there won?t be any extra money lying around to put into the stock market.
There is another reason why the stock indexes are stagnating here. The Q1, 2015 corporate earnings reporting season kicks off when Alcoa (AA) reports on April 8, or in six trading days. Until then, we are in the quiet period, and companies are not allowed the buy back their own stock.
This is a big deal, since companies buying back their own shares have provided major support for the stock market for many years. Possibly a quarter of all the net cash flow pouring into stocks since 2009 has come from this source.
Take it away, even for a short period, and the most bullish thing the market can do is move sideways, which is exactly what it has been doing for the past two months.
What happens when the tax payment deadline passes and the quiet period ends? Stocks take off like a bat out of hell. That will take us to the spring interim peak.
This is why I strapped on three new ?RISK ON? positions last Friday, longs in the Russell 2000 (IWM) and Goldman Sachs (GS) and a short in the euro (FXE).
Global Market Comments
March 30, 2015
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(LAST CHANCE TO ATTEND THE FRIDAY, APRIL 3 HONOLULU, HAWAII STRATEGY LUNCHEON)
(TAKE PROFITS ON CYTRX CORP. (CYTR)
CytRx Corporation (CYTR)
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