Mad Hedge Technology Letter
July 17, 2020
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(THE ROAD OUT OF SILICON VALLEY),
(AAPL), (CRM), (MSFT), (FB), (AMZN), (GOOGL)
Posts
In a study last year, 44% of Millennials planned to move out of the Bay Area in the “next few years.”
In the same study, 8% of Millennials indicated that they would move out of the Bay Area within the next 365 days.
Then Covid-19 hit.
The pandemic has accelerated this trend of Millennials ditching big-ticket cities and rental prices in San Francisco have experienced 30% drops with many owners offering free two months upon move in to salvage a souring situation.
The U.S. has also moved to ban foreign HB-1 visas citing the 40 million unemployed American citizens that are now looking for a job.
The knock-on effect is a wave of Indian and Chinese tech workers, who are usually the recipients of the HB-1 visas, that won’t be renting Silicon Valley apartments at inflated market prices.
The migratory trends sum it all up and the Bay Area has finally hit that inflection point where it is no longer the most desirable place to live anymore.
On a social level, the area has also become squalid like some third world countries due to a ravaging homeless problem that is growing faster than any software company.
The pandemic forced the local city government to create a tent encampment in front of San Francisco city hall.
The ones that weren’t gifted a spot in front of city hall were temporarily put up in five-star hotels in Russian Hill and paid by for the city because of the absence of any travelers.
Salesforce Founder and CEO Marc Benioff has lamented that San Francisco, where ironically he is from, is a diabolical “train wreck” and urged fellow tech CEOs to “walk down the street” and see it with their own eyes to observe the corrosion of society.
The leader of Salesforce doesn’t mince his words when he talks and beelines to the heart of the issues.
Sadly, the pandemic will put more pressure on the lower end of society and force more Americans into homelessness adding to the surge.
How many homeless can San Francisco absorb?
It’s scary to think about what will happen when the eviction moratorium ends and extended unemployment benefits stop.
It’s just another factor in a long list of why San Francisco is losing talent.
The environment has really turned from day to night in Silicon Valley where just a half a year ago, Silicon Valley was overflowing with tech jobs and now start-ups are shedding jobs faster than ever.
Uber, Lyft, and Google are just some that have rescinded job offers to new graduates, frozen salaries, slashed annual bonuses, and straight-up laid-off employees.
The trend of outsourcing tech jobs from California was already well underway before the pandemic.
That was exactly what Apple’s $1 billion investment into a new tech campus in Austin, Texas and Amazon adding 500 employees in Nashville, Tennessee is all about.
Apple also added numbers in San Diego, Atlanta, Culver City, and Boulder just to name a few.
Apple currently employs 90,000 people in 50 states and is in the works to create 20,000 more jobs in the US by 2023.
Most of these new jobs won’t be in Silicon Valley but is it possible that the pace of new hires will get bogged down because of the health crisis.
Millennials are reaching that age of family formation and they are fleeing to places that are affordable and possible to take the first step onto the property ladder.
The health crisis has crushed many of their dreams to become a first-time homebuyer, meaning they could become lifelong renters.
Millennials came of age during 9-11, graduated into the Great Recession of 2008, and have now been dealt a cruel and devastating blow of navigating through Covid-19 during many of their best years of income earning.
No wonder why Silicon real estate has dropped, people and their paychecks are on the way out.
In a perfect storm of a health crisis, economic crisis, and the desire to live in more physical space as most jobs become remote, San Francisco has never been less attractive at any point in time.
It will no longer be the economic juggernaut that was so vital to tech companies.
Silicon Valley simply doesn’t share the wealth with all of its participants and the place is now feeling the side effects.
The last time San Francisco was this unattractive, you would have to go back to before the California Gold Rush of 1848 when San Francisco was just a backwater village of 10,000 people.
When hiring comes back, look for many of the second-tier cities like Nashville to recover fast taking off from what Silicon Valley built.
Just as harrowing as the health crisis, the start of wildfire season has just commenced in the state of California.
It used to be such a great place to live.
Mad Hedge Technology Letter
July 15, 2020
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(CLOUD 101)
(AMZN), (MSFT), (GOOGL), (DOCU), (CRM), (ZS)
If you've been living under a rock the past few years, the cloud phenomenon hasn't passed you by and you still have time to cash in.
You want to hitch your wagon to cloud-based investments in any way, shape, or form.
Amazon leads the cloud industry it created.
It still maintains more than 30% of the cloud market. Microsoft would need to gain a lot of ground to even come close to this jewel of a business.
Amazon (AMZN) relies on AWS to underpin the rest of its businesses and that is why AWS contributes most of Amazon's total operating income.
Total revenue for just the AWS division would operate as a healthy stand-alone tech company if need be.
The future is about the cloud.
These days, the average investor probably hears about the cloud a dozen times a day.
If you work in Silicon Valley, you can triple that figure.
So, before we get deep into the weeds with this letter on cloud services, cloud fundamentals, cloud plays, and cloud Trade Alerts, let's get into the basics of what the cloud actually is.
Think of this as a cloud primer.
It's important to understand the cloud, both its strengths and limitations.
Giant companies that have it figured out, such as Salesforce (CRM) and Zscaler (ZS), are some of the fastest-growing companies in the world.
Understand the cloud and you will readily identify its bottlenecks and bulges that can lead to extreme investment opportunities. And that's where I come in.
Cloud storage refers to the online space where you can store data. It resides across multiple remote servers housed inside massive data centers all over the country, some as large as football fields, often in rural areas where land, labor, and electricity are cheap.
They are built using virtualization technology, which means that storage space spans across many different servers and multiple locations. If this sounds crazy, remember that the original Department of Defense packet-switching design was intended to make the system atomic bomb proof.
As a user, you can access any single server at any one time anywhere in the world. These servers are owned, maintained, and operated by giant third-party companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet (GOOGL), which may or may not charge a fee for using them.
The most important features of cloud storage are:
1) It is a service provided by an external provider.
2) All data is stored outside your computer residing inside an in-house network.
3) A simple Internet connection will allow you to access your data at any time from anywhere.
4) Because of all these features, sharing data with others is vastly easier, and you can even work with multiple people online at the same time, making it the perfect, collaborative vehicle for our globalized world.
Once you start using the cloud to store a company's data, the benefits are many.
- No Maintenance
Many companies, regardless of their size, prefer to store data inside in-house servers and data centers.
However, these require constant 24-hour-a-day maintenance, so the company has to employ a large in-house IT staff to manage them - a costly proposition.
Thanks to cloud storage, businesses can save costs on maintenance since their servers are now the headache of third-party providers.
Instead, they can focus resources on the core aspects of their business where they can add the most value, without worrying about managing IT staff of prima donnas.
- Greater Flexibility
Today's employees want to have a better work/life balance and this goal can be best achieved by letting them telecommute. Increasingly, workers are bending their jobs to fit their lifestyles, and that is certainly the case here at Mad Hedge Fund Trader.
How else can I send off a Trade Alert while hanging from the face of a Swiss Alp?
Cloud storage services, such as Google Drive, offer exactly this kind of flexibility for employees.
With data stored online, it's easy for employees to log into a cloud portal, work on the data they need to, and then log off when they're done. This way a single project can be worked on by a global team, the work handed off from time zone to time zone until it's done.
It also makes them work more efficiently, saving money for penny-pinching entrepreneurs.
- Better Collaboration and Communication
In today's business environment, it's common practice for employees to collaborate and communicate with co-workers located around the world.
For example, they may have to work on the same client proposal together or provide feedback on training documents. Cloud-based tools from DocuSign, Dropbox, and Google Drive make collaboration and document management a piece of cake.
These products, which all offer free entry-level versions, allow users to access the latest versions of any document so they can stay on top of real-time changes which can help businesses to better manage workflow, regardless of geographical location.
- Data Protection
Another important reason to move to the cloud is for better protection of your data, especially in the event of a natural disaster. Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc on local data centers in New York City, forcing many websites to shut down their operations for days.
The cloud simply routes traffic around problem areas as if, yes, they have just been destroyed by a nuclear attack.
It's best to move data to the cloud, to avoid such disruptions because there your data will be stored in multiple locations.
This redundancy makes it so that even if one area is affected, your operations don't have to capitulate, and data remains accessible no matter what happens. It's a system called deduplication.
- Lower Overhead
The cloud can save businesses a lot of money.
By outsourcing data storage to cloud providers, businesses save on capital and maintenance costs, money that in turn can be used to expand the business. Setting up an in-house data center requires tens of thousands of dollars in investment, and that's not to mention the maintenance costs it carries.
Plus, considering the security, reduced lag, up-time and controlled environments that providers such as Amazon's AWS have, creating an in-house data center seems about as contemporary as a buggy whip, a corset, or a Model T.
Global Market Comments
July 13, 2020
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(MARKET OUTLOOK FOR THE WEEK AHEAD, or HERE COME HERD IMMUNITY),
(INDU), (TSLA), (SPY), (GLD), (JPM), (IBB), (QQQ), (AAPL), (MSFT), (DCUE), (NVDA)
The US passed a single-day record of 70,000 new cases for Covid-19 over the weekend, with Florida bringing in an astounding 15,300.
We missed a chance to stop the epidemic in January because we were blind. Then we missed again in April because we were lazy, when New York City was losing nearly 1,000 souls a day and ignored the lessons therein.
So, we relentlessly continue our march towards herd immunity, when two-third of the population gets the disease, protecting the remaining one third. That’s about a year off.
That implies total American deaths will reach 2.2 million, more than we have lost from all our wars combined.
The faster people die, the closer we are to the end of the plague, which is good news for everyone.
And the stock market keeps going up every day, the worse the news, the faster. That may be happening because the more severe the shock to the system, the faster companies must evolve to survive, making them ever more profitable.
Out with the Old America, in with the new. The future is happening fast.
We here at Mad Hedge Fund Trader have just delivered the most astonishing quarter in our 13-year record, up some 41.98% from the March 16 low.
That makes me cautious. Things never stay that good for long. Just because I can’t see the next black swan doesn’t mean it isn’t going to happen.
If stocks rise when corona cases are exploding, what do they do when cases fall? Do they fall too, or do they rise even faster?
That’s above my pay grade. I’m only a captain, not a general.
So, I will be moving to a 100% cash position in coming days and then let the next black swan tell me what to do. If we suffer a severe dive, and 10%-20% is entirely possible, then I’ll jump back in with my “BUY” hat on. That means testing the lower up of my six-month (SPX) 2,700-$3,200 range.
If we suddenly surge to far greater heights and new all-time highs, then I will be selling short as fast as I can write the trade alerts.
In the meantime, we have Q2 earnings to look forward to in the coming week, which will certainly be one for the history books. The bullish view is that they will be down only 44% from a dismal Q1. The bearish view is far worse. Banks (JPM) kick off on Tuesday.
NASDAQ (QQQ) hit a new high at 10,622, with Apple (AAPL) and Microsoft (MSFT) leading the charge. Elon Musk is now looking at another $1.7 billion payday with his shares touching $1,500. I’m moving to 100% cash, peeling off one profitable position a day as each option play reaches its maximum profit. I just had the best quarter in a decade, up an eye-popping 40%, and I’m just not that smart to keep it going. Humility always wins in the long-term.
Goldman Sachs chopped its growth forecast in the face of soaring Covid-19 cases, paring their Q3 prediction from +33% to +25%. Political campaign rallies are spreading the disease faster than expected. Q1 most likely came in at negative -5%. Expect worse to come. If the stock market can’t break at 135,000 corona deaths, it will at 260,000 or 520,000, which is certainly coming.
NVIDIA topped Intel as most valuable chip company. No surprise here. High-end graphics cards are worth a lot more money than plain commodity processors. Keep buying dips on (NVDA) which we’ve been loading the boat with now for four years. There’s an easy double from here.
Warren Buffet bought Dominion Energy (DCUE), in one of the only distressed sales available this year, thanks so much to government support. With natural gas prices at all-time lows, the big boys are throwing in the towel. Immense public pressure is forcing public utilities to abandon fossil fuels. Warren will sell all of his newfound energy in the $10 billion deal to China. It’s the beginning of the end for carbon. Buy (TSLA) on dips.
Dividend Cuts will drive stock trading in H2. Energy, airline, cruise lines, casinos, movie theaters, and hotels are most at risk, while big technology companies like Apple are the safest. Currently, the S&P 500 is yielding 2.0%, while the ten-year US Treasury bond is paying out 0.65%. Room for a cut?
Tesla to reach $100 billion in annual revenue by 2025, says San Francisco-based JMP Securities. The logic goes that if they can produce 90,000 vehicles a quarter during a pandemic, 140,000 a quarter should be no problem by yearend. The news delivered a move in the shares to a new all-time high of $1,549. Inclusion of (TSLA) in the S&P 500 would also deliver a lot of forced institutional buying, which might take the shares up 40% more. The future is happening fast. Keep buying (TSLA) on dips for a 2021 target of $2,500. If this keeps up, we may see it next week. Remember, I traded Tokyo in 1989. Nothing is impossible.
US student visas were canceled in ostensibly an administration coronavirus-fighting measure, but really in the umpteenth measure to shut foreigners out. “America first” is turning into “America only.” Midwestern schools in particular will be hurt by the loss of 400,000 full tuition-paying international students, especially when state education budgets are getting cut to the bone. That’s down from 800,000 three years ago. If they’re already here, how does this help us? Most colleges are moving to online-only models to limit infections.
When we come out the other side of this, we will be perfectly poised to launch into my new American Golden Age, or the next Roaring Twenties. With interest rates still at zero, oil cheap, there will be no reason not to. The Dow Average will rise by 400% or more in the coming decade.
My Global Trading Dispatch enjoyed another blockbuster week, up an astounding +2.28. It was a week when everything worked in the extreme….again.
My eleven-year performance rocketed to a new all-time high of 381.74%. A triple weighting in biotech and a double weighting in gold were a big help. A foray into the banks proved immediately successful. I seem to have the Midas touch these days.
That takes my 2020 YTD return up to an industry-beating +25.83%. This compares to a loss for the Dow Average of -8.8%, up from -37% on March 23. My trailing one-year return popped back up to a record 66.22%, also THE HIGHEST IN THE 13-YEAR HISTORY of the Mad Hedge Fund Trader. My eleven-year average annualized profit recovered to a record +36.07%, another new high.
The only numbers that count for the market are the number of US Coronavirus cases and deaths, which you can find here. It’s jobs week and we should see an onslaught of truly awful numbers.
On Monday, July 13 at 10:00 AM EST, the June Inflation Expectations are out.
On Tuesday, July 14 at 7:30 AM EST, US Core Inflation for June is published
On Wednesday, July 15, at 7:30 AM EST, US Industrial Production for June is announced. At 10:30 AM EST, the EIA Cushing Crude Oil Stocks are out.
On Thursday, June 16 at 8:30 AM EST, Weekly Jobless Claims are announced. At 7:30 AM, US Retail Sales for June is printed.
On Friday, June 17, at 7:30 AM EST, the US Housing Starts for June are released.
The Baker Hughes Rig Count is out at 2:00 PM EST.
As for me, I am training hard for my upcoming 50-mile hike with the Boy Scouts, knocking off 10 miles a day at 9,000 feet on the Tahoe Rim Trail. I have to confess that I’m feeling the knees like never before.
As they used to say in the Marine Corps, “Pain is fear leaving the body.” More than knowledge comes with age. Pain is there as well.
Marine Corps to Boy Scout leader. It’s been a full life.
Stay healthy.
John Thomas
CEO & Publisher
The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader
The Years Have Not Been Kind
Global Market Comments
July 8, 2020
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(TRADING THE BLUE WAVE STOCK MARKET),
(FB), (AAPL), (MSFT), (AMZN), (ADBE), (SQ), (PYPL), (CRM), (SGEN), (REGN), (ILMN) (FEYE), (PANW), (AMD), (MU), (NVDA), (TSLA), (LEN), (PHM), (KBH), (XOM), (CVX), (XOM), (RTN), (NOC), (LMT), (KOL), (X), (GE)
At this point, it is possible that the president may lose the November election.
He is 14 points behind Democratic candidate Joe Biden in the polls. The odds at the London betting polls have him losing by a similar amount. My old employer The Economist magazine in London gives him a 10% chance of winning using a mix of economic and polling data.
And this assumes the election is held today. The fact is that the president is digging himself into a deeper hole every day, taking the wrong side of every issue confronting the country today. He seems to be refighting the Civil War….and taking the Confederate side when even the State of Mississippi is taking its symbol off its flag.
So, what will the post-Trump world look like? Will taxes go through the roof? Will the market crash? Is it time to go 100% cash, change our names, and move to a country with no US extradition treaty?
I don’t think so. In fact, with stocks soaring to meteoric new highs every day, the market expects that a Biden administration will be great news for stocks, perhaps the best ever.
Taxes will certainly go up. Favorable tax treatment of the energy, real estate, and private equity funds will get axed. Carried interest will finally become history. Marginal tax rate on net income over $1 billion could get hiked to the Roosevelt levels of 80-90%.
Biden has already announced an increase in the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%. That will cut earnings for the S&P 500 by $9 a share. But the stock market is not the economy, with S&P earnings only accounting for 10% of US GDP.
And the $9 companies lose in taxes they will make back and more from new government spending, which isn’t slowing down any time soon. Some 14,000 American bridges need to be rebuilt. The Interstate Highway System is a shambles. High-speed broadband needs to go rural. The electrification of the US needs to accelerate to accommodate the millions of electric cars headed our way.
I believe that eventually, 51 million Americans will lose their jobs as a result of the pandemic. Perhaps a third of those are never coming back because the future has been so accelerated. That will leave the broader U-6 Unemployment rate stuck in double digits for years, maybe for decades.
So, we’re going to need some kind of Roosevelt style programs like the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) who built much of the monolithic infrastructure that we all enjoy today.
At least 300,000 educated workers could immediately be put to work in contact tracing. Millions more could be employed in national infrastructure programs. One thing is certain. A new administration won’t stop massive government spending, it will simply redirect it.
And let's face it. A Biden win would bring a big expansion of Obamacare. With the best healthcare technology in the world, private industry has done the world’s worst job controlling the pandemic.
Countries with well-run national healthcare systems like Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Singapore have almost wiped out the disease. This is why I am avoiding the healthcare sector for the foreseeable future.
Who are the big winners of all this? Big tech (FB), (AAPL), (MSFT), (AMZN), medium tech (ADBE), fintech (SQ), (PYPL), the cloud (CRM), and biotech (SGEN), (REGN), and (ILMN).
Cybersecurity will always be in demand (FEYE), (PANW). The global chip shortage will continue to worsen (AMD), (MU), (NVDA).
And Tesla (TSLA)? What can I say? It is already up nearly 100-fold from my initial $16.50 recommendation in 2010, and I’ve bought three Tesla’s (two S’s and an X).
Followers of the Mad Hedge Trade Alert service know that I am already long these names up the wazoo, and is why I am up 26% in 2020. It’s simply a matter of all pre-pandemic trends hyper-accelerating, which we were already tapped into.
If you have to add a purely domestic sector, a gigantic Millennial tailwind will keep homebuilders bubbling for years like (LEN), (PHM), and (KBH).
And while you won’t find me as a player here, retail will recover. The sector has not prospered during the current administration, thanks to a trade war with China and the pandemic.
And the losers? There is a classification of “Trump” stocks you don’t want to be anywhere near. Energy will do terribly (XOM), (CVX), (XOM), with Texas tea possibly revisiting negative numbers. If you take away the tax breaks, energy hasn’t really made money in decades.
Defense stocks (RTN), (NOC), (LMT) will take a big hit from budget cutbacks and fewer wars. Coal (KOL) will finally get shut down for good, probably sold to China in bankruptcy proceedings. Industrials will continue to lag (X), (GE), with no more free handouts from the government and no technology advantage.
So if Biden wins, you don’t need to slit your wrists, hang yourself from the showerhead, or cease investing completely. Just take your stock market winnings and go out and get drunk instead.
Global Market Comments
June 30, 2020
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(STORAGE WARS),
(MSFT), (IBM), (CSCO), (SWCH),
(THE MAD HEDGE JUNE 4 TRADERS & INVESTORS SUMMIT RECORDING IS UP),
Global Market Comments
June 19, 2020
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(JUNE 17 BIWEEKLY STRATEGY WEBINAR Q&A),
(SPY), (AAPL), (FXE), (FXA), (BA), (UAL), (AAPL), (MSFT), (BIIB), (PFE), (OXY), (SPCE), (WMT), (CSCO), (TGT)
