There is no doubt in my mind that a major leg up in Tesla shares is coming, possibly soon. That’s because of the increasing number of “Bigfoot” type sightings of the Cybertruck, the most revolutionary new vehicle launch in a decade.
Social media is increasingly being populated by links to secret videos, drone pictures, charging station sightings, and insider leaks.
The car will me made of flat stainless-steel panels to cut costs on those expensive curves. The windows are armor-plated. It has a towing capacity of 14,000 pounds, can accelerate from zero to 60 mph in 2.9 seconds, and boasts a 500-mile range. It moves the auto industry to a 48-volt platform to save on copper costs. You can have all of this starting at $60,000.
To get on the waiting list, please click here. But you may have to wait for two years to get one. You’ll be somewhere in the 2 million waiting list.
Not only did I pay for this year’s summer vacation with this year’s Tesla profits, and it was not exactly a cheap one, but I paid for next year’s as well. I’m taking a Queen Mary owner’s suite, Orient Express, Hotel Cipriani in Venice kind of vacation.
I’m about to make a lot more.
I get most of my ideas for trade alerts from my own trading. They’re just infinitely more aggressive than the ones I send to the Mad Hedge Trade Alert service. I am much more careful with client money than my own, as I hate losing other people’s money more than anything.
I would never recommend what I did below for mere mortals. If I did, I’d probably end up in jail.
One great high risk leveraged strategy is to sell short Tesla puts outright. All my puts that I sold short this month for $12-$16 are expiring worthless.
It’s not for the faint of heart and it takes a half-century of risk tolerance building to do this kind of trading. Never short more puts than you can afford to buy the stock.
There were a few things required to do such a trade.
Since no one ever gets the absolute bottom, the initial outcome of a large leveraged position is a big loss. Most of you would stop out of the position when this happens. I kept doubling up.
For I had the power of my own convictions.
By selling short puts, I was more than happy to buy Tesla stock lower down if the stock went against me. Using margin, I could buy a lot of stock.
Now that’s a trade!
When I added this position, I thought it highly unlikely that I would get to buy Tesla stock at low prices for the following reasons:
1) The stock market was oversold.
2) Tesla was even more oversold, having fallen 30%.
3) A classic “cup and handle” formation was setting up on the charts. Upside breakout day was July 24.
4) The Volatility Index (VIX) failed to confirm the selloff.
5) After sitting in the sidelines investors had accumulated massive amounts of cash.
6) We are about to move into strongly positive seasonals.
7) Tesla is getting ready to buy back its own stock.
8) Tesla bears, and there are always a lot of them out there, had just freshly topped up their short positions, leaving the stock ripe for a short squeeze.
9) Tesla is one of the most volatile stocks in the market, with option implied volatility regularly hitting 100%. By comparison, the S&P 500 (SPX) sits at a positively boring 20%.
10) Fears of a deep recession were wildly overblown.
The real cherry on top of the cake was the $370 billion Biden Climate bill, which no one expected, came totally out of the blue, and had a ballistic effect on Tesla shares. Tesla is the overwhelming beneficiary of this legislation.
They might as well have called it the “Tesla shareholder enrichment plan.”
It’s easy to commit to paying $245 for a stock that you think someday will be worth $10,000. Tesla is currently the fastest-growing car company in the world with a near global monopoly in EVs. Its market share is 66%. The best Henry Ford could do with Ford Motors (F) in the 1910s was a US market share of 75%.
So, I will probably be doing a lot more of these. I don’t need the money; I just love winning.
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/New-Tesla.png455647Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2023-09-06 09:02:422023-09-06 12:16:04How to Make a Killing in Tesla
The reason, of course, is Fed governor Jay Powell’s comments that interest rates may have to stay higher for longer. He seems hell-bent on reaching his 2.0% inflation target, down from the current 3.2% and well off the 9.0% high.
That puts off any rally in the interest rate-sensitive sectors, which is almost everything, by three to six months. But then, markets discount fundamentals by six to nine months in advance.
You do the math.
That means a monster rally in all financial assets should ensue sometime in September or October that could last a decade.
What a surprise!
The possibility that the next rally will be explosive is bereft of doubt. A record $5.6 trillion is now sitting on the sidelines ready to dive into risk assets on the slightest pretense. We might be in for another January 4 repeat. That includes funds in money market funds, overnight bank deposits, 90-day T-bills, IRAs, 401Ks, and cash under the mattress.
It's all very reminiscent of 1982 when we enjoyed the exact demographic tailwind as we are enjoying now. An 18-year rally followed and took the Dow Average up 20-fold.
The United States has by far the strongest major economy in the world for a reason. A 3.5% Headline Unemployment Rate, 5.25% overnight interest rates, and a 3.2% inflation rate are supposed to be mathematically impossible, yet here we are.
Did I mention that 2024 is an election year? That's when the economic data magically improve, as they have during every election over the past 200 years. Stock investors notice this.
As I spent all day every day and well into the night conducting research, I noticed a curious development. All the bears seem to live on the East Coast, while those in Silicon Valley are the most bullish I’ve ever seen.
That’s because we here in California see the hyper-accelerating technology in every meeting, with every human contact, and right on our own doorsteps. We are the beta testers for the technology that the rest of the country and the world won’t see for a few years.
While the nation is debating climate change, there is a “Robot War” taking place in San Francisco over how rapidly to permit the expansion of the self-driving taxi fleet, now capped at 1,000.
The fact that their accident rate has been near zero, far lower than human-driven vehicles, is a major point in their favor. I’m getting used to seeing no driver in the car next to me.
Walked into a McDonald's or a Taco Bell lately? It’s all computers. My theory as to why UPS agreed to such a generous 40% pay increase over five years for 340,000 workers is that when the next contract comes up for negation, they will have gone all robotic by then.
Autonomous driving, artificial intelligence, quantum computers are all still in their infancy and are in no way reflected in share prices.
In the meantime, keep massaging those 5.25% 90-day T-bill rates and enjoy your summer vacation. But the time to go all in with risk is approaching.
So far in August, we are down -4.70%. My 2023 year-to-date performance is still at an eye-popping +60.80%. The S&P 500 (SPY) is up +17.10% so far in 2023. My trailing one-year return reached +92.45% versus +8.45% for the S&P 500.
That brings my 15-year total return to +657.99%. My average annualized return has fallen back to +48.15%, some 2.50 times the S&P 500 over the same period.
Some 41 of my 46 trades this year have been profitable.
The Oracle Speaks! Fed Governor Jay Powell might as well have been reading me the New York telephone book when he indicated that “Interest rates may have to stay higher for longer” during his Jackson Hole speech. The Fed only knows two speeds: too slow and too fast. The bears are coming out of the woodwork once again. Look for lower lows to buy into for all asset classes. Start positioning yourself for a monster yearend rally.
Markets Will Snore Until September 1 Jobs Report. The August Nonfarm Payroll report is expected to come in at a weak 175,000. Enjoy the last week of summer.
The US Budget Deficit is Climbing Once Again, after a super spike in 2020. Recent environmental spending has added another trillion dollars to the bill. That will seem a bargain if we can’t slow down exploding global temperatures….quickly. It was 120 degrees in Italy this summer. Mama Mia!
Has Apple (AAPL) Topped Out? With no new products on the horizon and interest rates rising, the bull market in Apple shares may have called it a day at last month’s 200 peak. As with the rest of the “Magnificent Seven,” there was a giant pull forward of performance into the first half of this year. All of the stock’s gains have been through multiple expansions, regaining much of what was lost in 2022.
Existing Home Sales Drop Again, demolished by record-high mortgage rates. July saw sales decline by 2.2% to a six-month low on sales of 4.15 million units. Home resales, which account for a big chunk of U.S. housing sales, fell 16.6% on a year-on-year basis in July.
Ten-Year Treasuries Hit New 16-year High, at 4.32%. We could be approaching a bond-selling climax around Jay Powell’s Jackson Hole Speech on Friday and the buying opportunity of the decade.
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, August 28 at 8:00 AM EST, the Dallas Fed Manufacturing Index is out.
On Tuesday, August 29 at 8:30 AM, the US JOLTS Job Openings Report is released.
On Wednesday, August 30 at 2:30 PM, the ADP Employment Change is published.
On Thursday, August 31 at 8:30 AM, the Weekly Jobless Claims are announced. Personal Income & Spending are also announced.
On Friday, September 1 at 2:30 PM, the Nonfarm Payroll Report for August is published. At 2:00 PM, the Baker Hughes Rig Count is printed.
As for me, The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader is now celebrating its 15th year of publication.
During this time, I have religiously pumped out 3,000 words a day, or 18 newsletters a week, of original, independent-minded, hard-hitting, and often wickedly funny research.
I spent my life as a war correspondent, Marine Corps combat pilot, Wall Street trader, and hedge fund manager, and if you can’t laugh after that, something is wrong with you.
I’ve been covering stocks, bonds, commodities, foreign exchange, energy, precious metals, real estate, and even agricultural products.
You’ve been kept up on my travels around the world and listened in on my conversations with those who drive the financial markets.
I also occasionally opine on politics, but only when it has a direct market impact, such as with the recent administration's economic and trade policies. There is no profit in taking a side.
The site now contains over 20 million words, or 30 times the length of Tolstoy’s epic War and Peace.
Unfortunately, it feels like I have written on every possible topic at least 100 times over.
So, I am reaching out to you, the reader, to suggest new areas of research that I may have missed until now which you believe justify further investigation.
Please send any and all ideas directly to me at support@madhedgefundtrader.com/, and put “RESEARCH IDEA” in the subject line.
The great thing about running an online business is that I can evolve it to meet your needs on a daily basis.
Many of the new products and services that I have introduced since 2008 have come at your suggestion. That has enabled me to improve the product’s quality, to your benefit. Notice how rapidly my trade alert performance is going up, now annualizing at +47% a year.
This originally started out as a daily email to my hedge fund investors giving them an update on fast market-moving events. That was at a time when the financial markets were in free fall, and the end of the world seemed near.
Here’s a good trading rule of thumb: Usually, the world doesn’t end. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes.
The daily emails gave me the scalability that I so desperately needed. Today’s global mega enterprise grew from there.
Today, the Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader and its Global Trading Dispatch is read in over 140 countries by 30,000 followers. The Mad Hedge Technology Letter, the Mad Hedge Biotech & Health Care Letter, Mad Hedge AI, and Jacquie’s Post also have their own substantial followings. And the daily Mad Hedge Hot Tips is one of the most widely read publications in the financial industry.
I’m weak in distribution in North Korea and Mali, in both cases due to the lack of electricity. But that may change.
One can only hope.
If you want to read my first pitiful attempt at a post, please click here for my February 1, 2008 post.
It urged readers to buy gold at $950 (it soared to $2,200), and buy the Euro at $1.50 (it went to $1.60).
Now you know why this letter has become so outrageously popular.
Unfortunately, I also recommended that they sell bonds short. I wasn’t wrong on that one, just early, about eight years too early.
I always get asked how long will I keep doing this?
I am already collecting Social Security, so that deadline came and went. My old friend and early Mad Hedge subscriber, Warren Buffet is still working at 92, so that seems like a realistic goal. And my old friend, Henry Kissinger, is still hard at it at 100 years old.
Hiking ten miles a day with a 50-pound pack, my doctor tells me I should live forever. He says he spends all day trying to convince his other patients to be like me, and the only one who actually does it is me.
The harsh truth is that I don’t know how to NOT work. Never tried it, never will.
The fact is that thousands of subscribers love me for what I do, pay for me to travel around the world first class to the most exotic destinations, eat in the best restaurants, fly the rarest historical aircraft, then say thank you. I even get presents (keep those pounds of fudge and bottles of bourbon coming!).
Given the absolute blast I have doing this job; I would be Mad to actually retire.
Take a look at the testimonials I get only on an almost daily basis and you’ll see why this business is so hard to walk away from (click here for those).
In the end, you are going to have to pry my cold dead fingers off of this keyboard to get me to give up.
Fiat Lux (let there be light).
Stay Healthy,
John Thomas
CEO & Publisher
The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/John-Thomas-bull.png350308Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2023-08-28 09:02:222023-08-28 15:46:32The Market Outlook for the Week Ahead, or The Failed Rally
Large parts of the UK economy are shutting down today, including the entire rail system, due to extreme heat. The temperature in London today is expected to top a record 107 degrees. Much of Britain’s infrastructure is simply not designed to operate at these temperatures.
France is worse, with temperatures there reaching 113 degrees. It will not be the last time that temps get this high. As for Southern Italy, it has become uninhabitable by humans at 116 degrees.
That brings the prospect that weather forecasts may become a much more important aspect of stock market predictions than they have in the past. Just like we have to now include new covid cases and deaths as part of our daily calculation, so might the high temperature of this day.
The temperature has in effect become a new economic indicator.
As for me, I am high in the Alps at 7,000 feet where it is a much more comfortable 80 degrees. The rivers are roaring below me with record glacier melts, tar on the roads is melting, and it is too hot to hike. With ice disappearing, there is talk of the Matterhorn breaking apart.
But at least I can catch up on my paperwork. The trouble is, so is everyone else and my Internet speed has slowed from 45 megabytes per second to an unusable 10.
Below is an email I received from British Rail which I rode only last week.
Dear Customer,
You may be aware that Network Rail has urged people across the country to only travel if absolutely necessary on Monday 18 and Tuesday 19 July. This comes as a result of the extreme heat forecast for these two days.
On Monday and Tuesday, temperatures are expected to reach up to 42°C in London and the surrounding area, and the mid-30s in the western parts of our network. As rail temperatures can be up to 20°C higher than the air around them, there is a risk of them buckling in the extreme heat.
As a result, Network Rail will introduce speed restrictions across the network to minimize the force on the tracks and reduce the chance of buckling. These speed restrictions will, in turn, make journeys longer and we will introduce a reduced service on Monday and Tuesday in a bid to give our customers certainty on what will run.
The speed restrictions will particularly affect our mainline services, with long-distance services to Exeter, Salisbury, Bournemouth, Weymouth, Southampton, and Portsmouth most likely to be impacted.
Service changes are likely to appear in journey planners at short notice, so anyone who chooses to travel despite the warnings on Monday or Tuesday is urged to check their journey before setting off and to expect last-minute delays and cancellations.
If you have no choice but to travel, you are urged to carry water with you, cover up, and wear sunscreen when traveling. Find out more about traveling in hot weather here.
If you choose to delay your travel, please note that the original ticket restrictions will still apply. If you are using an Advance Purchase ticket, please travel as close to the original departure time as possible or make use of Book With Confidence.
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/1yr-july1822.jpg331441Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2023-08-16 09:02:082023-08-16 11:33:16My New Economic Indicator
All traders and portfolio managers with experience approaching a half-century, like myself and a handful of close friends, agree on one thing.
Someday, you will be wrong.
I don’t mean just a little bit wrong, I mean disastrously wrong. A real humdinger, even a life-threatening experience. Even wrong up the wazoo.
In fact, most old salts, even the best performing ones, suffer at least a couple of 50% losses of their total assets, and at least one 75% hit, at least once in their lives.
We’ve all been there.
The 1973 oil crisis. The 1987 stock market crash, when the Dow Average gave up a withering 22% in a single day (I tried to place an order to buy stock at the close and the clerk burst into tears and dissolved into a puddle on the floor).
The Dotcom crash. And of course, the granddaddy of them all, the Great Crash of 2008, which you all remember with the greatest discomfort.
Even my mentor, Warren Buffet, has admitted to taking three 50% hits in his lifetime and lived to tell about it.
The trick is to keep these misfortunes from wiping you out so completely that you can never make a comeback.
Better yet, don’t get into trouble in the first place. And I’ll tell you exactly how to do that right now.
One of the great pleasures of running the Mad Hedge Fund Trader is that I get to speak to thousands of interesting people every year. Believe me, there are all kinds.
I have found kids straight out of school who take to trading like a fish to water. Their instincts are incredible. They figure out the harsh realities of the market decades before I ever did.
When they ask me questions, I think, “Damn! Why didn’t I think of that?”
I have seen several of these gifted, natural born traders use the Mad Hedge Fund Trader turn pennies into millions over unbelievably short times.
You see, they have the trader gene.
Sadly, I also run into the opposite extreme. With some people you could have George Soros sitting on their left, Paul Tudor Jones on their right, both guiding their hands on the mouse to execute trades, and they are still going to still lose money.
These are not stupid people.
I have met many with Harvard MBAs, advanced degrees from MIT, and even Phi Beta Kappa’s, and it doesn’t do them a whit of good on the trading front. They just don’t have trading in them.
In other words, they lack the trading gene.
When I stumble across these people, I tell them to quit trading, end the self-abuse, and preserve whatever wealth they have left. I then order them to buy what I call my “Buy and Forget Portfolio.”
This is a collection of only six investments, which I have assembled over the decades that will be profitable in almost all circumstances. In good years it will grow generously. In bad years it will be down marginally. Over the long term, it will do extremely well.
Here it is:
The Mad Hedge Buy and Forget Portfolio
20% domestic US stocks (SPY)
20% international stocks (IXUS)
10% emerging stock markets (EEM)
20% Real Estate Investment Trusts (VNQ)
15% long term US Treasury Bonds (TLT)
15% Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIP)
Notice that half the money is in equities and the remainder in fixed income securities.
If you initiated this portfolio in 1997, the year that TIPS first became available to the public, you would have earned an average annualized compounded return of 7.86% through the end of 2014, assuming reinvestment of dividends and interest.
During the bear market of 2000-2002, when the S&P 500 dropped 50%, this portfolio never suffered a loss of more than -4.7%. During the Great Crash of 2008, it fell -31%, versus -37% for the (SPY), and then very quickly bounced back.
Most long-only investors would have killed for returns like these.
So the bottom line is this. Expect a 4% drawdown every decade, a 31% hickey twice a century, and one of those twice-a-century events is only eight years behind us. That is not a bad proposition.
The heavy stock weighting can be easily explained by the fact that historically, stocks have outperformed bonds by a large margin.
For long periods of time, such as much of the 19th century, the Great Depression, and now, chronic structural deflation meant that bonds paid very little in interest.
Stocks also have the advantage in that during periods of inflation they can pass rising costs on to consumers via price hikes.
Guess what? We are just going into an inflationary period.
For the past 200 years, stocks have therefore delivered a compounded average annualized return of 8.3%.
Just to give you an example of how valuable the stock advantage can be, $1 invested in 1802 would be worth $8.8 million today.
This is why Oracle of Omaha Warren Buffet constantly sings the praises of compounding and dividend reinvestment and is why he rarely sells anything. In fact, his authorized biography is entitled Snowball (a great read, by the way).
The beauty of the Buy and Forget Portfolio is that the six elements counterbalance each other in all market circumstances. When stocks go up, bonds usually go down, and vice versa.
They both go the wrong way only for very short periods, such as in 2008 and always snap back.
And remember inflation, that long-forgotten thing where prices actually go up? It will make a return someday. And there is no better time to buy TIPS than during the deflationary surge that we are enduring now. TIPS prices are cheap.
Such is the beauty of diversification.
The great thing about the Buy and Forget Portfolio is that you can literally buy and forget about it. You won’t lose sleep at night, you could care less about what they say on CNBC, and don’t have to hide those embarrassing brokerage statements from your spouse.
The only thing you have to do is to rebalance it once a year to restore each component to its original weighting. More often than that and you run up big commission and tax bills.
Remember, you are trying to buy your own yacht, not your broker’s.
This will free you up to focus on the more important things in life.
Will Daenerys Targaryen gain her rightful place on the throne of the Seven Kingdoms in The Game of Thrones? Will Don Draper get his well-deserved comeuppance in the final season of Mad Men? Can the widow, Lady Mary, ever find true love again in the next season of Downton Abbey?
Of course, knowing all of this, some bad traders will continue to trade. For some, it is like an addition. They just have to win, whatever the cost. For others, it's like buying lottery tickets. Some just love the adrenaline and the thrill of the chase, even if it costs them money.
Whatever the reason, they continue trading until they run out of money. Then they will try to borrow your money to trade.
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/john-snow-e1514508880916.jpg333250Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2023-06-21 09:02:342023-06-21 12:36:10The Buy and Forget Portfolio
Mad Hedge has made fortunes for thousands of followers over the last 15 years with its aggressive options spread strategy, which profits mightily from falling market volatility ($VIX). That is what is happening in the market 95% of the time.
However, it doesn’t make sense when the ($VIX) drops below $20, and that may now continue to be the case for a prolonged period of time.
However, just as one window closes, another opens.
While low volatility makes options spreads no longer attractive, it makes two-year LEAPS the bargain of the century. With volatility this low, you essentially get the second year for free. That is more than adequate time to go into any recession that may or may not happen and then come back out the other side at max profit.
If the underlying stock suddenly rockets, which is often the case with my recommendations, you can collect 90% of the maximum potential profit in a two-year LEAPS within months, if not weeks.
Better yet, while we used to make 15%-20% on front month options spreads, which benefited from accelerated time decay, the profit on two-year LEAPS can run from 100% to 500%. One client bagged a 5,000%, or 50X profit on an NVIDIA (NVDA) LEAPS he strapped on last October.
He doesn’t work anymore.
The timing for this strategy adjustment is perfect. We have just entered a new bull market for stocks that could run for another decade. With the exception of the “Magnificent Seven,” most US stocks are now just above their bear market bottoms. What better time to increase your leverage tenfold.
I won’t be adding LEAPS to my daily position sheet or P&L. They will remain a front-month trading tool. So the millions you are about to make will just have to remain our little secret. Concierge members will get access to a dedicated website that will keep a running total of all Mad Hedge LEAPS issued.
All good strategies must come to an end. Market conditions change or the copycats and wannabees squeeze the life out of them. I have seen too many good traders go out of business clinging to strategies that worked yesterday, but not today. They were hauled away in straight jackets, kicking and screaming because they lost all their money.
The stock market is like working in a hurricane. If you don’t learn how to bend with the wind, you snap and end up in a pile of debris.
When the ($VIX) gets back above $20, or better yet $30, and the Mad Hedge Market Timing Index plunges down to the $20’s, I’ll be back fully loaded with front month options spreads by the dozens.
Good luck.
So far in June, we are up +0.47%. My 2023 year-to-date performance is still at an eye-popping +62.52%. The S&P 500 (SPY) is up only a miniscule +12.63% so far in 2023. My trailing one-year return reached +101.75% versus +24.19% for the S&P 500.
That brings my 15-year total return to +659.71%. My average annualized return has blasted up to +48.86%, another new high, some 2.54 times the S&P 500 over the same period.
Some 42 of my 46 trades this year have been profitable. Only 23 of my last 24 consecutive trade alerts have been profitable.
I executed no trades last week. Concierge members received a LEAPS trade alert on Crown Castle International (CCI), which regular subscribers should receive shortly. My longs in Tesla (TSLA) and Freeport McMoRan (FCX) expired at max profit, which I easily ran into the June 16 option expiration this week. I now have a very rare 100% cash position due to the lack of high-return, low-risk short-term trades.
A Mad Hedge Market Timing Index at 82 is not exactly encouraging me to bet the ranch. Don’t rush to buy the top.
On another matter, I am proud to say that every Mad Hedge service saw positions expire at their maximum profit at the June 16 quadruple witching options expiration.
Global Trading Dispatch rang the cash register with Tesla (TSLA) and Freeport McMoRan (FCX). The Mad Hedge Technology Letter coined it with Apple (AAPL). The Mad Hedge Biotech & Health Care Letter printed money with Amgen (AMGN). Jacquie’s Post pleased followers with a profit in the (TLT). Finally, Mad Hedge AI, launched only on Monday, saw the shares for its initial trade alert for (UNG) jump a breathtaking 15% in four days.
I must be doing something right.
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!
Tesla Model Y Became World’s Top Selling Car in Q1, the first EV to do so. Some 267,200 Y’s were shifted, edging out Toyota’s Corolla by 10,800 units, which led the field for decades. Elon Musk’s price-cutting volume play is working to the competition’s chagrin. The Model Y is on track to top one million sales this year. Buy (TSLA) on dips
Tesla Drops Model 3 Price to $33,000, net of $7,500 federal EV tax credit. That helped it become the world’s top-selling car. Late to the market EV makers are getting killed, hemorrhaging cash. That took the shares up to a new 2023 high of $231. Keep buying (TSLA) on dips.
Apple Launches $3,497 Vision Pro Headset, in a run at Meta (META) in the virtual headset world. It’s the company’s first new product launch since the Apple Watch in 2014 coining yet another new revenue stream. Apple shares hit a new all-time high on the news. Buy (AAPL) on dips. Weekly Jobless Claims Jump to 261,000, an increase of 28,000, as the deflationary effects of high-interest rates take hold.
Europe Enters a Recession, with a -0.1% GDP print in Q1. Sharp rises in Euro interest rates get the blame. General Motors Adopts Tesla’s Charging System, essentially giving a near monopoly to Elon Musk. (GM) is joining Ford’s (F) capitulation from two weeks ago. This should grow into a $20 billion a year profit item for Tesla. All of my outrageous forecasts are coming true. Buy (TSLA) on dips.
US to Send Another $2 Billion Worth of Advanced Missiles to Ukraine. The package includes advanced Raytheon (RTX) Himars and Lockheed (LMT) Patriot 3 missiles. Buy both (RTX) and (LMT) on dips as both missiles now have order backlogs extending for years.
Coinbase Gets Crushed after the SEC throws the book at them. The government agency is intent on destroying the entire crypto infrastructure. Get your money out if you can. Avoid (COIN) on pain of death.
Volatility Index ($VIX) Hits 3 ½ Year Low, at $14.26. Complacency with the S&P 500 is running rampant, which always ends in tears. The level implies a maximum up-and-down range of only 8.2% for 30 days.
Airline Profits to Double in 2023, as service sharply deteriorates with revenge travel accelerating. Looks for this summer to be a perfect travel storm. On Monday, June 19 is the first-ever Juneteenth National Holiday celebrating the freedom of the slaves in Texas, the last state to do so. Markets are closed.
On Tuesday, June 20 at 8:30 PM EST, US Building Permits for May are announced.
On Wednesday, June 21 at 10:00 AM, Fed Chairman Powell testifies in front of Congress.
On Thursday, June 22 at 8:30 AM, the Weekly Jobless Claims are announced.
On Friday, June 23 at 9:45 AM the S&P Global Flash PMI is printed. At 2:00 PM the Baker Hughes Rig Count is printed.
As for me, with the shocking re-emergence of Nazis on America's political scene, memories are flooding back to me of some of the most amazing experiences in my life. I thought we were done with these guys I have been warning my long-term readers for years now that this story was coming. The right time is now here to write it.
I know the Nazis well.
During the civil rights movement of the 1960s, I frequently hitchhiked through the Deep South to learn what was actually happening.
It was not usual for me to catch a nighttime ride with a neo-Nazi on his way to a cross burning at a nearby Ku Klux Klan meeting, always with an uneducated blue-collar worker who needed a haircut.
In fact, being a card-carrying white kid, I was often invited to come along.
I had a stock answer: "No thanks, I'm going to another Klan meeting further down the road."
That opened my driver up to expound at length on his movement's bizarre philosophy.
What I heard was chilling. Suffice it to say, I learned to talk the talk.
During 1968 and 1969, I worked in West Berlin at the Sarotti Chocolate factory in order to perfect my German. On the first day at work, they let you eat all you want for free.
After that, you got so sick that you never wanted to touch the stuff again. Some 50 years later and I still can’t eat their chocolate with sweetened alcohol on the inside.
My co-worker there was namedJendro, who had been captured by the Russians at Stalingrad and was one of the 5% of prisoners who made it home alive in 1955. His stories were incredible and my problems pale in comparison.
Answering an ad on a local bulletin board, I found myself living with a Nazi family near the company's Tempelhof factory.
There was one thing about Nazis you needed to know during the 1960s: They absolutely loved Americans.
After all, it was we who saved them from certain annihilation by the teeming Bolshevik hoards from the east.
The American postwar occupation, while unpopular, was gentle by comparison. It turned out that everyone loved Hershey bars. Americans became very good at looking the other way when Germain families were trying to buy food on the black market. That’s why Reichsmarks wasn’t devalued until 1948.
As a result, I got free room and board for two summers at the expense of having to listen to some very politically incorrect theories about race. I remember the hot homemade apple strudel like it was yesterday.
Let me tell you another thing about Nazis. Once a Nazi, always a Nazi. Just because they lost the war didn't mean they dropped their extreme beliefs.
Fast-forward 30 years, and I was a wealthy hedge fund manager with money to burn, looking for adventure with a history bent during the 1990s.
I was mountain climbing in the Bavarian Alps with a friend, not far from Garmisch-Partenkirchen, when I learned that Leni Riefenstahl lived nearby, then in her 90s.
Attending the USC film school decades earlier, I knew that Riefenstahl was a legend in the filmmaking community.
She produced such icons as Olympia, about the 1932 Berlin Olympics, and The Triumph of the Will, about the Nuremburg Nazi rallies. It is said that Donald Trump borrowed many of these techniques during his successful 2016 presidential run.
It was rumored that Riefenstahl was also the one-time girlfriend of Adolph Hitler.
I needed a ruse to meet her since surviving members of the Third Reich tend to be very private people, so I tracked down one of her black and white photos of Nubian warriors, which she took during her rehabilitation period in the 1960s.
It was my plan to get her to sign it.
Some well-placed intermediaries managed to pull off a meeting with the notoriously reclusive Riefenstahl, and I managed to score a half-hour tea.
I presented the African photograph, and she seemed grateful that I was interested in her work. She signed it quickly with a flourish.
I then gently grilled her on what it was like to live in Germany in the 1930s. What I learned was fascinating.
But when I asked about her relationship with The Fuhrer, she flashed, "That is nothing but Zionist propaganda."
Spoken like a true Nazi.
The interview ended abruptly.
I took my signed photograph home, framed it, and hung it on my office wall for a few years. Then I donated it to a silent auction at my kids' high school.
Nobody bid on it.
The photo ended up in storage at my home, and when it was time to make space, it went to Goodwill.
I obtained a nice high appraisal for the work of art and then took a generous tax deduction for the donation, of course.
It is now more than a half-century since my first contact with the Nazis, and all of the WWII veterans are gone. Talking about it to kids today, you might as well be discussing the Revolutionary War.
By the way, the torchlight parade we saw in Charlottesville, VA in 2017 was obviously lifted from The Triumph of the Will, except that they didn't use tiki poolside torches in Germany in the 1930s.
Good Luck and Good Trading
John Thomas
CEO & Publisher
The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/john-parthenon.jpg340432Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2023-06-20 09:02:262023-06-20 14:06:06The Market Outlook for the Week Ahead, or Time to Change Strategy
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