Global Market Comments
March 18, 2024
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(MARKET OUTLOOK FOR THE WEEK AHEAD, or THE BIG ROTATION IS ON),
(SNOW), (FCX), (XOM), (TLT), (ALB), (NVDA), (MSFT), (AAPL), (META), (GOOGL), (GOLD), (WPM), (UNP) (FDX), (UNG)
Posts
Here is the only statistic you need to know right now.
If NVIDIA (NVDA) continues growing at the same rate it has for the last year it will be larger than the entire global economy by 2030, about $100 trillion, up from the current $2 trillion.
Which suggests that it might not actually achieve that lofty goal. Others have reached the same conclusion as I and the stock held up remarkably well in the face of absolutely massive profit-taking last week.
I have been through past market cycles when other stocks seemed to want to go to infinity. There was Apple (AAPL) in the 1980s which went ballistic, then died, was reborn, and then went ballistic again. It is now capped out at a $2.7 trillion market valuation.
Then we all had a great time trading Tesla, which exploded from a split-adjusted $2.35 to $424 and now seems mired in one of its periodic 80% corrections. But mark my word, it is headed to $1,000 someday, taking it up to a $3.2 trillion valuation.
So if NVIDIA isn’t going to $100 trillion what else should be buying right now?
The answer has been apparent in the market for the past two weeks. Interest rate-sensitive commodities have been on a tear, rising 15%-20% across the board. Investors have been using expensive stocks like (NVDA), (MSFT), (AAPL), (META), and (GOOGL) as ATMs to fund purchases of cheap stocks which in some cases have not moved for years.
It really has been an across-the-board move with money pouring into the entire interest rate-sensitive sectors, including copper (FCX), gold (GOLD), silver (WPM), lithium (ALB), Aluminum (AA), and energy (XOM).
It has spread to other economically sensitive stocks like Union Pacific (UNP) and FedEx (FDX). There seems to be an American economic recovery underway, and the bull market is broadening out. The good news is that it’s not too late to get involved.
A lot of it is investor psychology. Investors fear looking stupid more than they fear losing money. If you buy NVIDIA here on top of a one-year tripling and it tanks you will look like an idiot. If you buy commodities here and they grind up for the rest of 2024 you will look like a genius.
While many of you got slaughtered by the collapse of natural gas this winter, with (UNG) cratering from $32 down to a lowly $15, there is in fact a silver lining to this cloud. Cheap energy costs are now permeating throughout the entire global economy and are filtering down to the bottom lines of companies, municipalities, and even governments.
This has been made possible by the growth of US natural gas production from 1 trillion MM BTUs to 7.5 trillion in just the past ten years. The US is now the largest gas and oil producer in the world by a large margin. Replacing Russia as Europe’s largest energy source in just a year was thought impossible and is now a fact and is also enabling the Continent to stand up to Russian Aggression.
There is hope after all.
One question I constantly received during last week’s Mad Hedge Traders & Investors Summit was “When will Tesla (TSLA) shares bottom? The answer is a very firm “Not yet!”
I have been trading the shares of Elon Musk’s creation for 15 years and can tell you that big surges in the stock always precede major generational changes at the company.
We had a nice run from my $2.35 split-adjusted cost when the first Model S came out (I got chassis number 125 off the assembly line), replacing the toy-like two-seat Tesla Roadster, which was built on a cute little Lotus Elise body from England.
The next big run came with the advent of the much cheaper Model 3 in 2017. The ballistic melt up to $424 began with the launch of the small SUV Model Y in 2020, now the biggest-selling car in the world. All we needed was for Elon Musk to sell $10 billion worth of his own stock by early 2022 to put the final top in.
Which raises the question of when the next major generational change at Tesla. That would be the introduction of the $25,000 Model 2 in 2025. Since everything at Tesla happens late (Elon uses deadlines to flog his staff), it better count on late 2025. That means you should start scaling in around the summer. I am already running the numbers on call spreads and LEAPS now.
Can it fall more in the meantime? Absolutely. $150 a share looks like a chip shot. But to only focus on the EV business, which will account for a mere 10% of Tesla’s final total profits, is to miss Elon’s long-term grand vision of a carbon-free world.
Tesla is in the process of becoming the largest electric power utility in the US, eventually providing charging for 150 million cars. It is taking over the car insurance business. My own premiums on my Model X have plunged by 90%.
It's on the way to becoming the world’s largest processor and recycler of lithium. Tesla has a massive large-scale power storage business that no one knows about.
I fully expect Tesla to become the world’s largest company in a decade. Tesla at $1,000 a share here we come. And while the car business may be slow to turn around, the ingredients that go into the cars, like copper (FCX), Aluminum (AA), and lithium (ALB) are starting to move now.
In February we closed up +7.42%. So far in March, we are up +1.34%. My 2024 year-to-date performance is at +4.48%. The S&P 500 (SPY) is up +6.92% so far in 2024. My trailing one-year return reached +48.70% versus +27.25% for the S&P 500.
That brings my 16-year total return to +681.11%. My average annualized return has recovered to +51.40%.
Some 63 of my 70 round trips were profitable in 2023. Some 11 of 19 trades have been profitable so far in 2024.
I stopped out of my position in Snowflake (SNOW) for a small loss figuring that the tech rally’s days may be number after the most heroic move in history. I then rotated the money into new longs in Freeport McMoRan (FCX) and ExxonMobile (XOM). I also took profits on my short in bonds (TLT) after a $3.50 point dive there. I am maintaining a long in (TLT). I am 70% in cash and am looking for new commodity plays to pile into.
CPI Comes in Hot at 0.4% in February. YOY inflation crawled up to 3.2% to 3.1% expected. Higher shelter and gasoline prices are to blame. Bonds tank as interest rate cuts get pushed back. So do stocks. The market was ripe for a correction anyway.
PPI Comes in Hotter than Hot, at 0.6%. That was higher than the 0.3% forecast from Dow Jones and comes after a 0.3% increase in January. Stocks dipped for two minutes and then rocketed back up. Bad news is good news. Go figure.
Weekly Jobless Claims Dip, to 209,000 to an expected 218,000, and down 1,000 from the previous week. It’s a go-nowhere number.
Next-Generation Boeing Delayed Until 2027, says Delta Airlines, a major customer. The 737-10, Boeing's biggest Max plane with a maximum seating capacity of 230 passengers, is pending certification by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Expect a hard look. Buy (BA) on the next meltdown.
BYD Launches its $12,500 Car, the Model e2 Hatchback, firing another shot across Tesla’s Bow. The EV will initially be available only in China, Tesla’s biggest market, and then in emerging countries without vehicle standards. Don’t expect to see them in the US.
Toyota Agrees to Biggest Wage Hike in 25 Years. Toyota, the world's biggest carmaker and traditionally a bellwether of the annual talks, said it agreed to the demands of monthly pay increases of as much as 28,440 yen ($193) and record bonus payments. Is the Bank of Japan about to raise interest rates? Is the Japanese yen about to rocket?
Inverted What? Economists are going up on the Inverted Yield Curve as a recession indicator. Short-term interest rates have been higher than long-term ones for two years now, but the recession never showed. Relying on obsolete data analysis can be fatal to your wealth.
My Ten -Year View
When we come out the other side of the recession, we will be perfectly poised to launch into my new American Golden Age or the next Roaring Twenties. The economy decarbonizing and technology hyper accelerating, creating enormous investment opportunities. The Dow Average will rise by 800% to 240,000 or more in the coming decade. The new America will be far more efficient and profitable than the old.
Dow 240,000 here we come!
On Monday, March 18, at 7:00 AM EST, the NAHB Housing Index is announced.
On Tuesday, March 19 at 8:30 AM, Housing Starts for February are released.
On Wednesday, March 20 at 11:00 AM, the Federal Reserve Interest rate decision is published
On Thursday, March 21 at 8:30 AM, the Weekly Jobless Claims are announced.
On Friday, March 15 At 2:00 PM, the Baker Hughes Rig Count is printed.
As for me, with all of the hoopla over the Oppenheimer movie winning six Academy Awards, including one for best picture, I thought I’d recall my own experience with the nuclear establishment buried in my long and distant past.
If you were good at math there were only two career choices during the early 1970s: teaching math or working for the Dept of Defense. Since I was sick of university after six years, I chose the latter.
That decision sent me down a long bumpy, dusty road in Mercury Nevada headed for the Nuclear Test Site. There was no sign. You could only find the turnoff from US Highway 95 marked by four trailers owned by the nearest hookers to the top-secret base.
Oppenheimer himself had died three years earlier, a victim of throat cancer induced by the chain-smoking of Luck Strikes that was common in those days. But everyone on the base knew him as they had all worked on the Manhattan Project when they were young men. They worshiped him like a god.
I did meet Edward Teller, who argued in the movie that the atomic bomb was a waste of time because his design of a hydrogen bomb was 100 times more powerful. The problem was that there was no target big enough to justify a bomb of that size (there still isn’t).
As I watched the film with my kids, now junior scientists in their own right, I kept pointing out “I knew him,” except they were gnarly old and white-haired by the time I met them. Of course, they are all gone now.
My memories of the Nuclear Test Site were never to ask questions, my visit to the Glass Desert where the sand had been turned into glass by above-ground tests in the fifties, and skinny dipping with the female staff in the small swimming pool at midnight.
The MPs were pissed.
With the signing of the SALT I Treaty in 1972, underground testing moved to computer models and I lost my job. So I was sent to Hiroshima to interview survivors and write a 30-year after-action report. These were some of the most cheerful people I ever met. If an atomic bomb can’t kill you, then nothing can.
When the Cold War ended in 1992, the United States judiciously stepped in and bought the collapsing Soviet Union’s entire uranium and plutonium supply.
For good measure, my hedge fund client George Soros provided a $50 million grant to hire every unemployed Soviet nuclear engineer. The fear then was that starving scientists would go to work for Libya, Iraq, North Korea, or Pakistan, which all had active nuclear programs. They ended up in the US instead.
That provided the fuel to run all US nuclear power plants and warships for 20 years. That fuel has now run out and chances of a resupply from Russia are zero. The Department of Defense attempted to reopen our last plutonium factory in Amarillo, Texas, a legacy of the Johnson administration.
But the facilities were deemed too old and out of date, and it is cheaper to build a new factory from scratch anyway. What better place to do so than Los Alamos, which has the greatest concentration of nuclear expertise in the world.
Los Alamos is a funny sort of place. It sits at 7,320 feet on a mesa on the edge of an ancient volcano so if things go wrong, they won’t blow up the rest of the state. The homes are mid-century modern built when defense budgets were essentially unlimited. As a prime target in a nuclear war, there are said to be miles of secret underground tunnels hacked out of solid rock.
You need to bring a Geiger counter to garage sales because sometimes interesting items are work castaways. A friend almost bought a cool coffee table which turned out to be part of an old cyclotron. And for a town designing the instruments to bring on the possible end of the world, it seems to have an abnormal number of churches. They’re everywhere.
I have hundreds of stories from the old nuclear days passed down from those who worked for J. Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves, who ran the Manhattan Project in the early 1940s. They were young mathematicians, physicists, and engineers at the time, in their 20’s and 30’s, who later became my university professors. The A-bomb was the most important event of their lives.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t relay this precious unwritten history to anyone without a security clearance. So, it stayed buried with me for a half century, until now.
Some 1,200 engineers will be hired for the first phase of the new plutonium plant, which I got a chance to see. That will create challenges for a town of 13,000 where existing housing shortages already force interns and graduate students to live in tents. It gets cold at night and dropped to 13 degrees F when I was there.
I was allowed to visit the Trinity site at the White Sands Missile Test Range, the first visitor to do so in many years. This is where the first atomic bomb was exploded on July 16, 1945. The 20-kiloton explosion set off burglar alarms for 200 miles and was double to ten times the expected yield.
Enormous targets hundreds of yards away were thrown about like toys (they are still there). Some scientists thought the bomb might ignite the atmosphere and destroy the world but they went ahead anyway because so much money had been spent, 3% of US GDP for four years. Of the original 100-foot tower, only a tiny stump of concrete is left (picture below).
With the other visitors, there was a carnival atmosphere as people worked so hard to get there. My Army escort never left me out of their sight. Some 79 years after the explosion, the background radiation was ten times normal, so I couldn’t stay more than an hour.
Needless to say, that makes uranium plays like Cameco (CCJ), NextGen Energy (NXE), Uranium Energy (UEC), and Energy Fuels (UUUU) great long-term plays, as prices will almost certainly rise all of which look cheap. US government demand for uranium and yellow cake, its commercial byproduct, is going to be huge. Uranium is also being touted as a carbon-free energy source needed to replace oil.
At Ground Zero in 1945
What’s Left of a Trinity Target 200 Yards Out
Playing With My Geiger Counter
Atomic Bomb No.3 Which was Never Used in Tokyo
What’s Left from the Original Test
Good Luck and Good Trading,
John Thomas
CEO & Publisher
The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader
Global Market Comments
March 6, 2024
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(WHY THE DOW IS GOING TO 240,000)
(X), IBM (IBM), (GM), (MSFT), (INTC), (DELL), (NVDA), (NFLX), (AMZN), (META), (GOOGL), (BITO)
For years, I have been predicting that a new Golden Age was setting up for America, a repeat of the Roaring Twenties. The response I received was that I was a permabull, a nut job, or a conman simply trying to sell more newsletters.
Now some strategists are finally starting to agree with me. They too are recognizing that a ganging up of three generations of investment preferences will combine to drive markets higher during the 2020s, much higher.
How high are we talking? How about a Dow Average of 240,000 by 2035, up another 515% from here? That is a 40-fold gain from the March 2009 bottom.
It’s all about demographics, which are creating an epic structural shortage of stocks. I’m talking about the 80 million Baby Boomers, 65 million from Generation X, and now 85 million Millennials. Add the three generations together and you end up with a staggering 230 million investors chasing stocks, the most in history, perhaps by a factor of two.
Oh, and by the way, the number of shares out there to buy is actually shrinking, thanks to a record $1 trillion or more in corporate stock buybacks for the past decade.
I’m not talking pie-in-the-sky stuff here. Such ballistic moves have happened many times in history. And I am not talking about the 17th-century tulip bubble. They have happened in my lifetime. From August 1982 until April 2000, the Dow Average rose, you guessed it, exactly 20 times, from 600 to 12,000, when the Dotcom bubble popped.
What have the Millennials been buying? I know many, like my kids, their friends, and the many new Millennials who have recently been subscribing to the Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader. Yes, it seems you can learn new tricks from an old dog. But they are a different kind of investor.
Like all of us, they buy companies they know, work for, and are comfortable with. During my dad’s generation that meant loading your portfolio with US Steel (X), IBM (IBM), and General Motors (GM).
For my generation, that meant buying Microsoft (MSFT), Intel (INTC), and Dell Computer (DELL).
For Millennials that means focusing on NVIDIA (NVDA), Netflix (NFLX), Amazon (AMZN), Meta (META), and Alphabet (GOOGL). Oh, and they like Bitcoin too (BITO).
That’s why the Magnificent Seven account for all of the past year’s monster gains.
There is another gale force tailwind pushing stocks up. The enormous profits created by artificial intelligence are essentially replacing the Federal Reserve as an unlimited source of liquidity. If you missed the quantitative easing and the free money of the 2010s, you get another pass at the brass ring. But you have heard me talk about this before so I won’t bore you.
There is one catch to this hyper-bullish scenario. Somewhere on the way to the next market apex at Dow 240,000, we need to squeeze in a recession. Bear markets in stocks historically precede recessions by an average of seven months. But for the time being, it looks like smooth sailing.
When I get a better read on precise dates and market levels, you’ll be the first to know.
Global Market Comments
March 4, 2024
Fiat Lux
(MARKET OUTLOOK FOR THE WEEK AHEAD, or WHO NEEDS THE FED?
(AAPL), (TSLA), (AAPL), (GOOGL), (MSFT), (MSFT), (BRK/B), (BA), (JPM), (BA), (C), (SNOW), (NVDA)
I have to tell you that this has been a really good week to be John Thomas.
The accolades have been pouring in. During February, my followers have made the most money in their lives, including myself. NVIDIA (NVDA), up 110% in four months, is now the largest position in everyone’s portfolios, if not because of my prodding, then through capital appreciation alone.
Institutions limited to keeping single holdings to 5% or 10% got away with delaying their rebalancing as long as possible.
Is it 1995 for 2,000? I vote for the former, meaning that the current melt-up could have five more years to run with occasional breaks.
Exploding corporate profits and rocketing share capitalizations have replaced the Federal Reserve as a new endless source of liquidity, as I knew it would.
Who needs the Fed? Who needs interest rate cuts?
Best of all, this new source of super liquidity isn’t at the whim of a single man, nor subject to politics of any kind. It has in fact become its own self-fulfilling prophecy.
Dow 240,000 here we come, as I have been endlessly repeating for years!
It says a lot that hedge funds, the “smart money,” are heavily overweight the Magnificent Seven, while retail mutual funds, the “dumb money” are underweight. The technology they are overweight is mostly in Apple, that great backward-looking company. This implies that to catch up mutual funds are going to have to buy hundreds of billions of Mag Seven stocks and sell their Apple to pay for the move.
The largest single source of demand for stocks will be the $1.25 trillion in corporate buybacks. What will they buy? Apple (AAPL), Alphabet (GOOGL), and Microsoft (MSFT), the three largest purchasers of their own stocks.
When the leader of the fastest-growing, best-performing company with the top-performing stock speaks, you have to pay attention. The next $1 trillion build-out in AI infrastructure is here, says NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, now one of the richest men in the world.
Have a good week! I’ll be spending my time shoveling snow.
In February, we closed up +7.42%. My 2024 year-to-date performance is at +3.14%. The S&P 500 (SPY) is up +7.33% so far in 2024. My trailing one-year return reached +55.73% versus +42.04% for the S&P 500.
That brings my 15-year total return to +679.77%. My average annualized return has recovered to +51.30%.
Some 63 of my 70 trades last year were profitable in 2023. Some 9 of 13 trades have been profitable so far in 2024.
I used the ballistic move-in (NVDA) to take profits in my double long there. I am maintaining a single long in (AMZN) and Snowflake (SNOW) and am 80% in cash given the elevated level of the markets.
Core PCE Comes in Cool, at 2.8%, as expected. The personal consumption expenditures price index excluding food and energy costs increased 0.4% for the month and 2.8% from a year ago, as expected. Stocks and bonds liked it, but the US dollar hated it.
Snowflake Crashes, down 20%, on weak guidance. CEO Frank Slootman is retiring. This is the third company he has taken public and it’s time to retire. He will stay on as chairman. This is one of the best cloud plays out there, and now you have a chance to buy it close to the October bottom. Buy (SNOW) on dips.
Weekly Jobless Claims Pop, up 13,000 to 215,000. However, continuing claims, which run a week behind, rose to just above 1.9 million, a gain of 45,000 and higher than the FactSet estimate of 1.88 million.
Apple Pulls the Plug on EV Project, wrong product at the wrong time. AI is where the action is. We may have to wait until the summer for this company when it starts to discount the next-generation iPhone release in the fall. Tesla can now sleep easy. Avoid (AAPL) and buy (TSLA) on dips.
Berkshire Hathaway to Top $1 Trillion in a Year, up from the current $900 billion, according to UBS analyst Brian Meredith. I think that’s a low target. Buy (BRK/B) on dips.
Boeing Hit by Damning Report, faulting the company for ineffective procedures and a breakdown in communications between senior management and other members of staff, according to an FAA report. The report is the latest to find fault with safety at Boeing, which suffered its latest blow when a panel covering an unused door flew off during an Alaska Airlines flight on Jan. 5. Buy (BA) on dips.
Warren Buffet Says Their Nothing to Buy, in his annual letter to shareholders. The few targets left are few and far between and heavily picked over. (BRK/B) has also lost the advice of its principal mentor, Charlie Munger at the age of 99. Last year Berkshire acquired Dairy Queen and Berkshire Energy. But with $905 billion in assets, those will hardly move the needle on his incredible track record. The 93-year-old Buffet has outperformed the S&P 500 by 141:1 since 1964.
CEO Jamie Diamond Sell $150 Million in (JPM) Shares, cashing in on the historic “BUY” he had at the 2009 market bottom. He earned a 36X gain on that trade. (JPM) remains the “must-own” bank for most institutional investors.
New Home Sales Weaken, curbed by frigid weather, but demand for new construction remains underpinned by a persistent shortage of previously owned homes. New home sales increased 1.5% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 661,000 units in January. Economists had forecast new home sales rising to a rate of 680,000 units.
Another Regional Bank is in Trouble. Commercial real estate lender New York Community Bancorp said it discovered “material weaknesses” in how it tracks loan risks, wrote down the value of companies acquired years ago, and replaced its leadership to grapple with the turmoil. The stock plunged. Expect this to be a recurring problem. The US banking system is in the process of consolidating from 4,236 banks to six. Buy (JPM), (BA), and (C) on dips.
Millennials are Becoming the Richest Generation in History. The so-called greatest generation — those typically born from 1928 to 1945 — and baby boomers — born between 1946 and 1964 — will hand over the reins to those born from 1981 to 1996 when they pass on their property- and equity-rich assets. In the U.S. alone, the shift would see $90 trillion of assets move between generations.
My Ten-Year View
When we come out the other side of the recession, we will be perfectly poised to launch into my new American Golden Age or the next Roaring Twenties. The economy decarbonizing and technology hyper accelerating, creating enormous investment opportunities. The Dow Average will rise by 800% to 240,000 or more in the coming decade. The new America will be far more efficient and profitable than the old.
Dow 240,000 here we come!
On Monday, March 4, nothing of note is announced.
On Tuesday, March 5 at 8:30 AM EST, ISM Services are released.
On Wednesday, March 6 at 2:00 PM, the Jolts Job Openings Report is published
On Thursday, March 7 at 8:30 AM, the Weekly Jobless Claims are announced.
On Friday, March 8 at 2:30 PM, the Nonfarm Payroll Report for February is published. At 2:00 PM the Baker Hughes Rig Count is printed.
As for me, I’ve found a new series on Amazon Prime called 1883. It is definitely NOT PG rated, nor is it for the faint of heart. But it does remind me of my own cowboy days.
When General Custer was slaughtered during his last stand at the Little Big Horn in 1876 in Montana, my ancestors spotted a great buying opportunity. They used the ensuing panic to pick up 50,000 acres near the Wyoming border for ten cents an acre.
Growing up as the oldest of seven kids, my parents never missed an opportunity to farm me out with relatives. That’s how I ended up with my cousins near Broadus, Montana for the summer of 1966.
When I got off the Greyhound bus in nearby Sheridan, I went into a bar to call my uncle. The bartender asked his name and when I told him “Carlat” he gave me a strange look.
It turned out that my uncle had killed someone in a gunfight in the street out front a few months earlier, which was later ruled self-defense. It was the last public gunfight seen in the state, and my uncle hasn’t been seen in town since.
I was later picked up in a beat-up Ford truck and driven for two hours down a dirt road to a log cabin. There was no electricity, just kerosene lanterns, and a propane-powered refrigerator.
Welcome to the 19th century!
I was hired as a cowboy, lived in a bunk house with the rest of the ranch hands, and was paid the pricely sum of a dollar an hour. I became popular by reading the other cowboys' newspapers and their mail since they were all illiterate. Every three days we slaughtered a cow to feed everyone on the ranch. I ate steak for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
On weekends, my cousins and I searched for Indian arrowheads on horseback, which we found by the shoe box full. Occasionally we got lucky finding an old rusted Winchester or Colt revolver just lying out on the range, a remnant of the famous battle 90 years before. I carried my own six-shooter to help reduce the local rattlesnake population.
I really learned the meaning of work and developed callouses on my hands in no time. I had to rescue cows trapped in the mud (stick a burr under their tail and make them mad), round up lost ones, and sawed miles of fence posts. When it came time to artificially inseminate the cows with superior semen imported from Scotland, it was my job to hold them still. It was all heady stuff for a 15-year-old.
The highlight of the summer was participating in the Sheridan Rodeo. With my uncle being one of the largest cattle owners in the area, I had my pick of events. So, I ended up racing a chariot made from an old oil drum, team roping (I had to pull the cow down to the ground), and riding a Brahman bull. I still have a scar on my left elbow from where a bull slashed me, the horn pigment clearly visible.
I hated to leave when I had to go home and back to school. But I did hear that the winters in Montana are pretty tough.
It was later discovered that the entire 50,000 acres was sitting on a giant coal seam 50 feet thick. You just knocked off the topsoil and backed up the truck. My cousins became millionaires. They built a modern four-bedroom house closer to town with every amenity, even a big-screen TV. My cousin also built a massive vintage car collection.
During the 2000s, their well water was poisoned by a neighbor’s fracking for natural gas, and water had to be hauled in by truck at great expense. In the end, my cousin was killed when the engine of the classic car he was restoring fell on top of him when the rafter above him snapped.
It all gave me a window into a lifestyle that was then fading fast. It’s an experience I’ll never forget.
Good Luck and Good Trading,
John Thomas
CEO & Publisher
The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader
Mad Hedge Technology Letter
February 28, 2024
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(GOOGLE HITS A ROUGH PATCH)
(GOOGL), (MSFT), (OPEN AI)
Google’s stock has felt the pain the last few days.
Why?
Its generative AI has gone wrong or at least producing controversial images as Google’s AI technology produces historical figures in different ethnic races.
The backlash was so bad that Google CEO Sundar Pichai issued a mea culpa.
The incident marks the latest misstep from Google as it scrambles for positioning in the blossoming market for AI products and plays catch up to Microsoft (MSFT) and its AI partner OpenAI ChatGPT.
In a memo to staff on Tuesday, CEO Sundar Pichai said, "I know that some of its responses have offended our users and shown bias — to be clear, that’s completely unacceptable, and we got it wrong."
The underwhelming AI performance means that Google is falling way behind other competition.
All investors care about these days is the trajectory of AI and stocks go up just based on that.
There must be a question of whether the generative AI research they are doing is good enough and if they have the right talent to compete.
Right now it certainly doesn’t look good.
Google is in the unfamiliar position of not being the leader in a core, [machine learning]-driven technology.
Google is trying hard to catch up and now needs to go backward to repair a core technology component while dealing with a major PR blunder.
Google's first AI fumble came a year ago when the company released a demo of its AI chatbot, Bard, a few months after ChatGPT exploded onto the scene.
Google's chatbot spits out an inaccurate response in a promotional video that was widely circulated online. In the immediate aftermath, skittish investors wiped $100 billion from Google's market value just as Microsoft's fortunes climbed.
Google explained in a recent blog post that it tuned its Gemini image generation tool to show a range of people of different ethnicities and other characteristics but that it failed to account for cases that should not depict diversity.
This is setting up for a great buy-the-dip moment for the company.
In the short term, Google investors have been burnt.
The Mad Hedge Tech Letter had a bullish position in GOOGL and it got torched.
However, Google has been a good short-term trade since it became a duopoly with Meta.
The fact is that Silicon Valley is turning into a race for AI and Google are the kings of search using the older generation.
That doesn’t quite mean they possess the correct talent to compete in AI.
Search was never geared towards this one area of technology that has become the newest thing.
Google has dropped 12% since its January highs which is surprising because they have been a solid bet for years to rebound from any weakness.
Now Google has the unenviable task of proving to investors that they have the ability and capacity to go toe to toe at the high levels of the AI race.
We won’t see deteriorating ad numbers soon, but over time, this could become a slow burn of them ceding search share as AI becomes integrated into the search business.
I still believe Google is worth holding long-term, but we are seeing a mild pullback after a great 2023.
Global Market Comments
February 20, 2024
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(MARKET OUTLOOK FOR THE WEEK AHEAD, or HOW THE CPI LIED),
(NVDA), (MSFT), (AMZN), (V), (PANW), (CCJ) (AAPL), (TSLA), (GOOGL), (MSFT), (AMZN), (META), (UBER), (UUP)
It’s pretty obvious that when the Consumer Price Index was released last Tuesday, the data point was lying through its teeth. The 0.4% increase in the Core CPI brought the YOY gain to a heart-palpitating 3.9%, much higher than expected. The stock market thought it was telling God’s home truth by plunging 740 points at its low.
Interest rate sensitives, like bonds, utilities, real estate, precious metals, energy, and foreign currencies were particularly hard hit.
I have been in the financial markets quite a long time now and as a result, am pretty used to being told porky pies (lies in London’s East End). Take the CPI for example. The reported number came in at a sizzling 3.3% for January. That is enough to kill off any hopes of a Fed interest rate cut in 2024, thus the ensuing wreckage in the market.
However, back out a single number, the 6.0% rise in housing rental costs, and the inflation rate drops all the way to 2.0%, bang on the Fed’s long-term inflation target. In other words, interest rates should be cut RIGHT NOW!
That is clearly the view that the markets came around to on Wednesday, which saw the Dow Average recover 151 points.
Unfortunately, lying is a fact of life in the stock market at every conceivable level. But learn to tolerate it and you can make millions of dollars. That works for me. Like my old college statistics professor used to tell me: “Statistics are like a bikini bathing suit; what they reveal is fascinating, but what they conceal is essential.”
In fact, we may see the stock market bouncing back and forth like a ping pong ball between big technology and the interest rate sectors, depending on what the bond market is doing that day driving traders nuts. After all, it was YOU who wanted to be in show business!
In the meantime, complacency rules all. Cash flows into stocks are near all-time highs. Market strategists have been ratcheting up their yearend targets on a daily basis, even me (I’m now at SPX 6,000). The option put/call ratio is about as low as it gets, meaning there is a universal belief that stocks will continue to appreciate. That’s with the S&P 500 earnings multiple trading at a rich 20.5.
I would be remiss in my duties as a financial advisor if I did not also warn you that these are all market-topping signals, at least for the short term.
Double Yikes, and Heavens to Betsy!
Of course, all eyes will be on the Q4 NVIDIA earnings this week, out after the close on Wednesday and probably the most important data release of the year. Everything else this week is essentially meaningless.
If earnings come in anything less than perfect, up 100% YOY, it could trigger a long overdue correction in the stock market in general and (NVDA) in particular. On the other hand, earnings just might come in more than perfect.
I have been covering (NVDA) for more than a decade back when it was just a video game play and I describe it today as a monopoly on the world’s most valuable product. Their top-end H100 graphics cards are now selling for a breathtaking $30,000 each and Meta (META) just ordered 450,000 of these babies, partly so their competitors can’t get their hands on them. For those who don’t have a calculator that is a single order worth a mind-blowing $13.5 billion.
That is why the stock is up 224% in a year and 50X since the first Mad Hedge trade alert on the company went out at a split-adjusted $2.00. Those who think they can clone (NVDA) and their products overnight can dream on. Most employees have golden handcuffs in the form of vested options at the same $2.00 strike price or lower.
The Magnificent Seven are still cheap relative to the rest of the market. Their price-to-growth ratio (PEG Ratio) is still only half the rest of the market. The Mag Seven will see earnings grow 20% this year with a price-earnings multiple of 30X giving you a PEG of 1.5X. The Unmagnificent 493 are selling at a PEG ratio of 3.0X, meaning they are twice as expensive.
Just thought you’d like to know.
So far in February, we are up +3.42%. My 2024 year-to-date performance is also at -0.86%. The S&P 500 (SPY) is up +4.72% so far in 2024. My trailing one-year return reached +59.62% versus +24.57% for the S&P 500.
That brings my 15-year total return to +675.77%. My average annualized return has retreated to +51.32%.
Some 63 of my 70 trades last year were profitable in 2023.
I am maintaining a double long in, you guessed it, (NVDA). My longs in (MSFT), (AMZN), (V), (PANW), and (CCJ) all expired at their maximum potential profits with the February option expiration.
CPI Smacks Market, coming in at 0.3% in January instead of the expected 0.2%. The highflyers took the biggest hit. Bonds were destroyed, taking ten-year US Treasury yields up to 4.30%. Is the falling interest rate story dead, or just resting? Rising rents were the big villain here.
US Retail Sales Dive 0.8% in January, a shocking decline from the blowout in December. Consumers didn’t bite on those New Year Sales because they actually started in November. Winter storms as well as technical factors had distorted the data.
Weekly Jobless Claims Dropped to 212,000, an improvement of 8,000 from the previous week. Continuing claims rose to 1,895,000.
https://www.dol.gov/ui/data.pdf
Here are Dan Niles’ Tech Shorts, Apple (AAPL), (TSLA), and Alphabet (GOOGL). He is long Microsoft (MSFT), (AMZN), (META), and of course NVIDIA (NVDA). Sounds like a good call to me. Dan knows what he is doing.
Uber Announces First Ever Share Buy Back, some $7 billion. In the meantime, they have to cope with a driver strike. Buy (UBER) on dips.
$929 Billion in US Commercial Real Estate Loans are Due this Year or 20% of the total. Will there be widespread defaults or will borrowers get rescued by falling interest rates in the second half? Will they extend and pretend? Avoid regional banks like the plague, which lack the capital to cope with this.
US Dollar (UUP) Hits Three Month High, on the hot CPI. You need a falling CPI to get a weak buck. The Euro plunged to $1.07, the British pound to $1.25, the Australian dollar to 65 cents, and the Japanese yen to ¥151.
NVIDIA Now Tops Amazon in Market Value, at $1.2 trillion now the fourth most valuable company in the US. It could eventually top Microsoft’s (MSFT) market cap as it is growing much faster. Those (NVDA) LEAPS are looking pretty good. The shares are up 50% so far in 2024. Buy (NVDA) on dips.
Biden to Ban Chinese EV Car Imports. The measures would apply to electric vehicles and parts originating from China, no matter where they are assembled, in a bid to prevent Chinese makers from moving cars and components into the United States through third countries such as Mexico. Chinese cars will never meet US safety standards. Try driving in China.
My Ten-Year View
When we come out the other side of the recession, we will be perfectly poised to launch into my new American Golden Age or the next Roaring Twenties. The economy decarbonizing and technology hyper accelerating, creating enormous investment opportunities. The Dow Average will rise by 800% to 240,000 or more in the coming decade. The new America will be far more efficient and profitable than the old.
Dow 240,000 here we come!
On Monday, February 19, the markets are closed for Presidents Day.
On Tuesday, February 20 no data of importance is released.
On Wednesday, February 21 at 2:00 PM EST, the Minutes from the previous Federal Open Market Committee meeting are published. NVIDIA earnings are released after the market closes.
On Thursday, February 22 at 8:30 AM EST, the Weekly Jobless Claims are announced. Existing Home Sales are Released.
On Friday, February 23 at 2:30 PM the Baker Hughes Rig Count is printed.
As for me, the first thing I did when I received a big performance bonus from Morgan Stanley in London in 1988 was to run out and buy my own airplane.
By the early 1980s, I’d been flying for over a decade. But it was always in someone else’s plane: a friend’s, the government’s, a rental. And Heaven help you if you broke it!
I researched the market endlessly, as I do with everything, and concluded that what I really needed was a six-passenger Cessna 340 pressurized twin turbo parked in Santa Barbara, CA. After all, the British pound had just enjoyed a surge against the US dollar so American planes were suddenly a bargain. It had a maximum range of 1,448 miles and therefore was perfect for flying around Europe.
The sensible thing to do would have been to hire a professional ferry company to fly it across the pond. But what’s the fun in that? So, I decided to do it myself with a copilot I knew to keep me company. Even more challenging was that I only had three days to make the trip, as I had to be at my trading desk at Morgan Stanley on Monday morning.
The trip proved eventful from the first night. I was asleep in the back seat over Grand Junction, Colorado, when I was suddenly awoken by the plane veering sharply left. My co-pilot had fallen asleep, running the port wing tanks dry and shutting down the engine. He used the emergency boost pump to get it restarted. I spent the rest of the night in the co-pilot’s seat trading airplane stories.
The stops at Kansas City, MO, Koshokton, OH, and Bangor, ME proved uneventful. Then we refueled at Goose Bay, Labrador in Canada, held our breath, and took off for our first Atlantic leg.
Flying the Atlantic in 1988 is not the same as it is today. There were no navigational aids and GPS was still top secret. There were only a handful of landing strips left over from the WWII summer ferry route, and Greenland was still littered with Mustangs, B-17s, B24s, and DC-3s. Many of these planes were later salvaged when they became immensely valuable. The weather was notoriously bad. And a compass was useless, as we flew so close to the magnetic North Pole the needle would spin in circles.
But we did have NORAD, or America’s early warning system against a Russian missile attack.
The practice back then was to call a secret base somewhere in Northern Greenland called “Sob Story.” Why it was called that I can only guess, but I think it has something to do with a shortage of women. An Air Force technician would mark your position on the radar. Then you called him again two hours later and he gave you the heading you needed to get to Iceland. At no time did he tell you where HE was.
It was a pretty sketchy system, but it usually worked.
To keep from falling asleep the solo pilots ferrying aircraft all chatted on a frequency of 123.45 MHz. Suddenly, we heard a mayday call. A female pilot had taken the backseat out of a Cessna 152 and put in a fuel bladder to make the transatlantic range. The problem was that the pump from the bladder to the main fuel tank didn’t work. With eight pilots chipping in ideas, she finally fixed it. But it was a hair-raising hour. There is no air-sea rescue in the Arctic Ocean.
I decided to play it safe and pick up extra fuel in Godthab, Greenland. Godthab has your worst nightmare of an approach, called a DME Arc. You fly a specific radial from the landing strip, keeping your distance constant. Then at an exact angle, you turn sharply right and begin a decent. If you go one degree further, you crash into a 5,000-foot cliff. Needless to say, this place is fogged 365 days a year.
I executed the arc perfectly, keeping a threatening mountain on my left while landing. The clouds mercifully parted at 1,000 feet and I landed. When I climbed out of the plane to clear Danish customs (yes, it’s theirs), I noticed a metallic scraping sound. The runway was covered with aircraft parts. I looked around and there were at least a dozen crashed airplanes along the runway. I realized then that the weather here was so dire that pilots would rather crash their planes than attempt a second go.
When I took off from Godthab, I was low enough to see the many things that Greenland is famous for polar bears, walruses, and natives paddling in deerskin kayaks. It was all fascinating.
I called into Sob Story a second time for my heading, did some rapid calculations, and thought “damn”. We didn’t have enough fuel to make Iceland. The wind had shifted from a 70 MPH tailwind to a 70 MPH headwind, not unusual in Greenland. I slowed down the plane and configured it for maximum range.
I put out my own mayday call saying we might have to ditch, and Reykjavik Control said they would send out an orange bedecked Westland Super Lynch rescue helicopter to follow me in. I spotted it 50 miles out. I completed a five-hour flight and had 15 minutes of fuel left, kissing the ground after landing.
I went over to Air Sea Rescue to thank them for a job well done and asked them what the survival rate for ditching in the North Atlantic was. They replied that even with a bright orange survival suit on, which I had, it was only about 50%.
Prestwick, Scotland was uneventful, just rain as usual. The hilarious thing about flying the full length of England was that when I reported my position, the accents changed every 20 miles. I put the plane down at my home base of Leavesden and parked the Cessna next to a Mustang owned by rock star Randy Newman.
I asked my ferry pilot if ferrying planes across the Atlantic was always so exciting. He dryly answered “Yes.” He told me in a normal year about 10% of the planes go missing.
I raced home, changed clothes, and strode into Morgan Stanley’s office in my pin-stripped suit right on time. I didn’t say a word about what I just accomplished.
The word slowly leaked out and at lunch, the team gathered around to congratulate me and listen to some war stories.
Good Luck and Good Trading,
John Thomas
CEO & Publisher
The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader
Flying the Atlantic in 1988
Looking for a Place to Land in Greenland
Landing on a Postage Stamp in Godthab Greenland
On the Ground in Greenland
No Such a Great Landing
Flying Low Across Greenland
Gassing Up in Iceland
Almost Home at Prestwick
Back to London in 1988
