Global Market Comments
March 23, 2018
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(DON'T MISS THE MARCH 28 GLOBAL STRATEGY WEBINAR),
(FRIDAY, APRIL 6, INCLINE VILLAGE, NEVADA, STRATEGY LUNCHEON)
(WHY US BONDS LOVE CHINESE TARIFFS),
(TLT), (TBT), (SOYB), (BA), (GM)
What if you want to be a little more aggressive with your investment strategy, say twice as aggressive? What if markets don't deliver any year on year change?
Then you need a little more pizzazz in your portfolio, and some extra leverage to earn your crust of bread and secure your retirement.
It turns out that I have just the solution for you. This would be my "Passive/Aggressive Portfolio".
I call it passive in that you just purchase these positions and leave them alone and not trade them. I call it aggressive as it involves a basket of 2x leveraged ETF's issued by ProShares, based Bethesda, MD (click here for their link).
The volatility of this portfolio will be higher. But the returns will be double what you would get with an index fund, and possibly much more. It is a "Do not open until 2035" kind of investment strategy.
Here is the makeup of the portfolio:
(ROM) - ProShares Ultra Technology Fund - The three largest single stock holdings are Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), and Facebook (FB). It was up 80.95% last year. For more details on the fund, please click here.
(UYG) - ProShares Ultra Financials Fund - The three largest single stock holdings are Wells Fargo (WFC), Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B), and JP Morgan Chase (JPM). It was up 38.42% last year. For more details on the fund, please click here.
(UCC) - ProShares Ultra Consumer Services Fund - The three largest single stock holdings are Amazon (AMZN), Walt Disney (DIS), and Home Depot (HD). It was up 3.71% last year. For more details on the fund, please click here.
(DIG)- ProShares Ultra Oil & Gas Fund - The three largest single stock holdings are ExxonMobil (XOM), Chevron (CVX), and Schlumberger (SLB). It was DOWN 9.20% last year. For more details on the fund, please click here.
(BIB) - ProShares Ultra NASDAQ Biotechnology Fund - The three largest single stock holdings are Amgen (AMGN), Regeneron (REGN), and Gilead Sciences (GILD). It was up 40.49% last year, please click here.
You can play around with the sector mix at your own discretion. Just focus on the fastest growing sectors of the US economy, which the Mad Hedge Fund Trader does on a daily basis.
It is tempting to add more leveraged ETF's for sectors like gold (UGL), to act as an additional hedge.
There is also the 2X short Treasury bond fund (TBT), which I have been trading in and out of for years, a bet that long-term bonds will go down, interest rates rise.
There are a couple of provisos to mention here.
This is absolutely NOT a portfolio you want to own going into a recession. So, you will need to exercise some kind of market timing, however occasional.
The good news is that I make more money in bear markets than I do in bull markets because the volatility is so high. However, to benefit from this skill set, you have to keep reading the Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader.
There is also a problem with leveraged ETF's in that management and other fees can be high, dealing spreads wide, and tracking error huge.
This is why I am limiting the portfolio to 2X ETF's, and avoiding their much more costly and inefficient 3X cousins, which are really only good for intraday trading. The 3X ETF's are really just a broker enrichment vehicle.
There are also going to be certain days when you might want to just go out and watch a long movie, like Gone With the Wind, with an all ETF portfolio, rather than monitor their performance, no matter how temporary it may be.
A good example was the flash crash, when the complete absence of liquidity drove all of these funds to huge discounts to their asset values.
Check out the long-term charts, and you can see the damage that was wrought by high frequency traders on that cataclysmic day, down -53% in the case of the (ROM). Notice that all of these discounts disappeared within hours. It was really just a function of the pricing mechanism being broken.
I have found the portfolio above quite useful when close friends and family members ask me for stock tips for their retirement funds.
It was perfect for my daughter, who won't be tapping her teacher's pension accounts for another 45 years, when I will be long gone. She mentions her blockbuster returns every time I see her, and she has only been in them for five years.
Imagine what technology, financial services, consumer discretionaries, biotechnology, and oil and gas will be worth then? It boggles the mind. My guess is up 100-fold from today's levels.
You won't want to put all of your money into a single portfolio like this. But it might be worth carving out 10% of your capital and just leaving it there.
That will certainly be a recommendation for financial advisors besieged with clients complaining about paying high fees for negative returns in a year that is unchanged, or up only 1%-2%. Virtually everyone has them right now.
Adding some spice, and a little leverage to their portfolios might be just the ticket for them.
When I was a little kid in the early 1950s, my grandfather used to endlessly rail against Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The WWI veteran, who was mustard gassed in the trenches of France and was a lifetime, died-in-the-wool Republican, said the former president was a dictator and a traitor to his class who trampled the constitution with complete disregard. Candidates Hoover, Landon, and Dewey would have done much better jobs.
What was worse, FDR had run up such enormous debts during the Great Depression that, not only would my life be ruined, so would my children's lives. As a six year old, this disturbed me deeply, as it appeared that just out of diapers, my life was already pointless.
Grandpa continued his ranting until three packs a day of unfiltered Lucky Strikes finally killed him in 1977. He insisted until the day he died that there was no definitive proof that cigarettes caused lung cancer, even though during to war they were referred to as ?coffin nails?.
What my grandfather?s comments did do was spark in me a permanent interest in the government bond market, not only ours, but everyone else?s around the world.
So, whatever happened to the despised, future ending Roosevelt debt? In short, it went to money heaven.
I like to use old movies as examples. Remember, when someone walked into a diner in those old black and white flicks? The prices on the wall menu? said: ?Coffee: 5 cents, Hamburgers: 10 cents, Steak: 50 cents.?
That is where the Roosevelt debt went. By the time the 20 and 30-year Treasury bonds issued in the 1930s came due, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam happened, along with the great inflation that followed.
The purchasing power of the dollar cratered, falling roughly 90%, Coffee was now $1.00, a hamburger $2.00, and a cheap steak at Outback cost $10.00. The government, in effect, only had to pay back 10 cents on the dollar in terms of current purchasing power on whatever it borrowed in the thirties.
Who paid for this free lunch? Bond owners, who received minimal and, often, negative real inflation adjusted returns on fixed income investments for three decades.
In the end, it was the risk avoiders who picked up the tab. This is why bonds were known as ?certificates of confiscation? during the seventies.
This is not a new thing. About 300 years ago, governments figured out there was easy money to be made by issuing paper money, borrowing massively, stimulating the local economy, and then repaying the debt in devalued future currencies.
This is one of the main reasons why we have governments, and why they have grown so big. Unsurprisingly, France was the first, followed by England and every other major country.
Ever wonder how the new, impoverished United States paid for the Revolutionary War? It issued paper money by the bale, which dropped in purchasing power by two thirds by the end of the conflict in 1783. The British helped too by flooding the country with counterfeit paper money.
The really fascinating thing about financial markets so far this year is that I see history repeating itself. Owners of bonds had a great start, but I think the worm has turned.
I agree with bond maven, Geoffrey Gundlach, that bonds peaked in both the US and Europe last week, and that we are eventually heading back to a 2.75%-3.0% yield on the ten-year Treasury bond. Geoffrey has been long bonds until now.
Sell every rally for the rest of the year.
Bondholders can expect to receive a long series of rude awakenings when they get their monthly statements. No wonder Bill Gross, the former head of bond giant, PIMCO, says he expects to get ashes in his stocking for Christmas this year.
The scary thing is that we could be only two years into a new 30-year bear market for bonds that lasts all the way until 2042.
This is certainly what the demographics are saying, which predict an inflationary blow off in decades to come that could take short-term Treasury yields to a nosebleed 12% once more.
That scenario has the leveraged short Treasury bond ETF (TBT), which has recently leapt from $31 to $43, soaring all the way to $200.
If you wonder how yields could get that high in a decade, consider one important fact. The largest buyers of American bonds for the past three decades have been Japan and China. Between them, they have soaked up over $2 trillion worth of our debt, some 12% of the total outstanding.
Unfortunately, both countries have already entered very negative demographic pyramids, which will forestall any future large purchases of foreign bonds. They are going to need the money at home to care for burgeoning populations of old age pensioners.
So, who becomes the buyer of last resort? No one, unless the Federal Reserve comes back with QE IV, V, and VI.
Check out the chart below, and it is clear that the downtrend in long term Treasury bond yields going all the way back to April, 2011 is broken, and that we are now heading substantially up.
The old resistance level at 2.40% will become the new support. That targets a new range for bonds of 2.40%-2.90%, possibly for the rest of 2016.
There is a lesson to be learned today from the demise of the Roosevelt debt. It tells us that the government should be borrowing as much as it can right now with the longest maturity possible at these ultra low interest rates and spending it all.
With inflation at nil, they have a free pass to do so. In effect, it never has to pay it back, but enables us to reap immediate benefits. My friend, Fed Reserve Chairwoman, Janet Yellen, certainly thinks so.
If I were king of the world, I would borrow $5 trillion tomorrow and disburse it only in areas that create domestic US jobs. Not a penny would go to new social programs. Long-term capital investments should be the sole target. Here is my shopping list:
$1 trillion ? new Interstate freeway system
$1 trillion ? additional infrastructure repairs and maintenance
$1 trillion ? conversion of our transportation system to natural gas
$1 trillion ? construction of a rural broadband network
$1 trillion ? investment in R&D for everything
The projects above would create 5 million new jobs quickly.
Who would pay for all of this? Today?s investors in government bonds, half of whom are foreigners, principally the Chinese and Japanese.
How did my life turn out? Was it ruined, as my grandfather predicted? Actually, I've done pretty well for myself, as did the rest of my generation, the baby boomers. My kids are doing OK too.
Grandpa was always a better historian than a forecaster. But he did have the last laugh. He made a fortune in real estate, betting correctly on the inflation that always follows borrowing binges.
I had the great pleasure of having breakfast the other morning with my long time friend, Mohamed El-Erian, former co-CEO of the bond giant, PIMCO.
Mohamed argues that there has been a major loss of liquidity in the financial markets in recent decades that will eventually come home to haunt us all.
The result will be a structural increase in market volatility, and wild gyrations in the prices of financial assets that will become commonplace.
We have already seen a few of these in recent weeks. German ten-year bund yields jumped from 0.01% to 0.20% in a mere two weeks, a gap once thought unimaginable. The Euro has popped from $1.08 to $1.03.
Since July, we have watched in awe as the ten-year Treasury yield ratcheted up from 1.23% to 2.40%.
The worst is yet to come.
It is a problem that has been evolving for years.
When I started on Wall Street during the early 1980s, the model was very simple. You have a few big brokers servicing millions of small individual customers at fixed, non-negotiable commissions.
The big houses made so much money they could spend some money facilitating counter cycle customers trades. This means they would step up to bid in falling markets, and make offers in rising ones.
In any case, volatility was so low then that this never cost all that much, except on those rare occasions, such as the 1987 crash (we lost $75 million in a day! Ouch!).
Competitive, meaning falling, commissions rates wiped out this business model. There were no longer the profits to subsidize losses on the trading side, so the large firms quit risking their capital to help out customers altogether.
Now you have a larger numbers of brokers selling to a greatly shrunken number of end buyers, as financial assets in the US have become concentrated at the top.
Assets have also become institutionalized as they are piled into big hedge funds, and a handful of big index mutual funds, and ETFs. These assets are managed by people who are also much smarter too.
The small, individual investor on which the industry was originally built has almost become an extinct species.
There is no more ?dumb money? left in the market.
Now those placing large orders are at the complete mercy of the market, often with egregious results.
Enter volatility. Lots of it.
What is particularly disturbing is that the disappearance of liquidity is coming now, just as the 35 year bull market in bonds is ending.
An entire generation of bond fund managers, and almost two generations of investors, have only seen prices rise, save for the occasional hickey that never lasted for more than a few months. They have no idea how to manage risk on the downside whatsoever.
I am willing to bet money that you or your clients have at least some, if not a lot of your/their? money tied up in precisely these funds. All I can say is, ?Watch out below.?
When the flash fire hits the movie theater, you are unlikely to be the one guy who finds the exit.
We're hearing a lot about when the Federal Reserve finally gets around to raising interest rates next month that it will make no difference, as rates are coming off such a low base.
You know what? It may make a difference, possibly a big one.
This is because it will signify a major trend change, the first one for fixed income in more than three decades. That?s all most of these guys really understand are trends, and the next one will have a big fat ?SELL? pasted on it for the fixed income world.
El-Erian has one of the best 90,000-foot views out there. A US citizen with an Egyptian father, he started out life at the old Salomon Smith Barney in London and went on to spend 15 years at the International Monetary Fund.
He joined PIMCO in 1999, and then moved on to manage the Harvard endowment fund. His book, When Markets Collide, was voted by The Economist magazine as the best business book of 2008.
He regularly makes the list of the world?s top thinkers. A lightweight Mohamed is not.
His final piece of advice? Engage in ?constructive paranoia? and structure your portfolio to take advantage of these changes, rather than fall victim to them.
I have long advocated my ?Buy and Forget? portfolio for those who are terrible at trading.
This is where you buy just six self hedging, counterbalancing exchange traded funds and then rebalance once a year (click here for the article).
But what if you want to be a little more aggressive, say twice as aggressive? What if markets don?t deliver any year on year change, as they have done this year?
Then you need a little more juice in your portfolio, and some extra leverage to earn your crust of bread and secure your retirement.
It turns out that I have just the solution for you. This would be my ?Passive/Aggressive Portfolio?.
I call it passive in that you just purchase these positions and leave them alone and not trade them. I call it aggressive as it involves a basket of 2x leveraged ETFs issued by ProShares, based in Bethesda, MD (click here for their site).
The volatility of this portfolio will be higher. But the returns will be double what you would get with an index fund, and possibly much more. It is a ?Do not open until 2035? kind of investment strategy.
Here is the makeup of the portfolio:
(ROM) ?- ProShares Ultra Technology Fund - The three largest single stock holdings are Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), and Facebook (FB). It is up 13.7% so far this year. For more details on the fund, please click here: http://www.proshares.com/funds/rom_daily_holdings.html.
(UYG) ? ProShares Ultra Financials Fund - The three largest single stock holdings are Wells Fargo (WFC), Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B), and JP Morgan Chase (JPM). It is up 6.2% so far this year. For more details on the fund, please click here: http://www.proshares.com/funds/uyg_index.html.
(UCC) ? ProShares Ultra Consumer Services Fund - The three largest single stock holdings are Amazon (AMZN), (Walt Disney), (DIS), and Home Depot (HD). It is up 18.3% so far this year. For more details on the fund, please click here: http://www.proshares.com/funds/ucc.html.
(DIG) -- ProShares Ultra Oil & Gas Fund - The three largest single stock holdings are ExxonMobil (XOM), Chevron (CVX), and Schlumberger (SLB). It is DOWN 38.2% so far this year. For more details on the fund, please click here: http://www.proshares.com/funds/dig.html.
(BIB) ? ProShares Ultra NASDAQ Biotechnology Fund ? The three largest single stock holdings are Amgen (AMGN), Regeneron (REGN), and Gilead Sciences (GILD). It is up 15% so far this year, but at one point (before the ?Sell in May and Go away? I widely advertised) it was up a positively stratospheric 64%. For more details on the fund, please click here; http://www.proshares.com/funds/bib.html.
You can play around with the sector mix at your own discretion. Just focus on the fastest growing sectors of the US economy, which the Mad Hedge Fund Trader does on a daily basis.
It is tempting to add more leveraged ETFs for sectors that are completely bombed out, like gold (UGL), which has pared 27% of its value in 2015, and commodities (UCD) which is off 15%.
But it is likely that these despised ETFs will move down before they move up, especially going into year end.
There is also the 2X short Treasury bond fund (TBT), which I have been trading in and out of for years, a bet that long-term bonds will go down, interest rates rise.
There are a couple of provisos to mention here.
This is absolutely NOT a portfolio you want to own going into a recession. So you will need to exercise some kind of market timing, however occasional.
The good news is that I make more money in bear markets than I do in bull markets because the volatility is higher. However, to benefit from this skill set, you have to keep reading the Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader.
There is also a problem with leveraged ETFs in that management and other fees can be high, dealing spreads wide, and tracking errors huge.
This is why I am limiting the portfolio to 2X ETFs, and avoiding their much more costly and inefficient 3X cousins, which are really only good for intraday trading. The 3X ETFs are really just a broker enrichment vehicle.
There are also going to be certain days when you might want to just go out and watch a long movie, like Gone With the Wind, with an all ETF portfolio, rather than monitor their performance, no matter how temporary it may be.
A good example was the August 24 flash crash, when the complete absence of liquidity drove all of these funds to huge discounts to their asset values.
Check out the charts below, and you can see the damage that was wrought by high frequency traders on that cataclysmic day, down -53% in the case of the (ROM). Notice that all of these discounts disappeared within hours. It was really just a function of the pricing mechanism being broken.
I have found the portfolio above quite useful when close friends and family members ask me for stock tips for their retirement funds.
It was perfect for my daughter who won?t be tapping her teacher?s pension accounts for another 45 years, when I will be long gone. She mentions her blockbuster returns every time I see her, and she has only been in them for five years.
Imagine what technology, financial services, consumer discretionaries, biotechnology, and oil and gas will be worth then? It boggles the mind. My guess is up 100 fold from today?s levels.
You won?t want to put all of your money into a single portfolio like this. But it might be worth carving out 10% of your capital and just leaving it there.
That will certainly be a recommendation for financial advisors besieged with clients complaining about paying high fees for negative returns in a year that is unchanged, or up only 1%-2%. Virtually everyone has them right now.
Adding some spice, and a little leverage to their portfolios might be just the ticket for them.
It?s Time to Spice Up Your Portfolio
I have never been one to run with the pack.
I'm the guy who eternally marches to a different drummer, not in the next town, but the other hemisphere.
I would never want to join a club that would lower its standards so far that it would invite me as a member.
On those rare times when I do join the lemmings, I am punished severely.
Like everyone and his brother, his fraternity mate, and his long lost cousin, I thought bonds would fall this year and interest rates would rise.
After all, this is normally what you get in the seventh year of an economic recovery. This is usually when corporate America starts to expand capacity and borrow money with both hands, driving rates up.
Although I was wrong on the market direction, Treasury bonds have been one of my top performing asset classes this year. I used every spike in prices to buy (TLT) vertical put spreads $3-$5 in the money, and raked in profits almost every month.
Of course, looking back with laser-sharp 20/20 hindsight, it is so clear why fixed income securities of every description have been on a tear all year.
I will give you ten reasons why bonds won't crash. In fact, they may not reach a 3% yield for at least another five years.
?
1) The Federal Reserve is pushing on a string, attempting to force companies to increase hiring, keeping interest rates at artificially low levels.
My theory on why this isn?t working is that companies have become so efficient, thanks to hyper accelerating technology, that they don?t need humans anymore. They also don?t need to add capacity.
?2) The US Treasury wants low rates to finance America?s massive $19 trillion national debt. Move rates from 0% to 6% and you have an instant financial crisis.
3) With Japan and Europe in a currency price war and a race to the bottom, the world is sending its money to the US to chase higher interest rates. An appreciating greenback which is now at close to a five-year peak is also funneling more money into bonds.
The choices for ten-year government bonds are Japan at 0.4%, Germany at 0.0%,?Switzerland at a negative -0.48% and the US at 1.65%. It all makes our bonds look like a screaming bargain.
4) Since the 2009 peak, the US budget deficit has fallen the fastest in history, down 75% from $1.6 trillion to a mere $400 billion, and lower numbers beckon.
Obama?s tax hikes did a lot to shore up the nation?s balance sheet. A growing economy also throws off a ton more in tax revenues. As a result, the Treasury is issuing far fewer bonds, creating a shortage.
5) This recovery has been led by small ticket auto purchases, not big ticket home purchases. The last real estate crash is still too recent a memory for many traumatized buyers, at least for those few who can get a mortgage. This keeps loan demand weak, and interest rates at subterranean levels.
6) The Fed?s policy of using asset price inflation to spur the economy has been wildly successful. Bonds are included in these assets, and they have benefited the most.
7) New rules imposed by Dodd-Frank force institutional investors to hold much larger amounts of bonds than in the past.
8) The concentration of wealth with the top 1% also generates more bond purchases. It seems that once you become a billionaire, you become ultra conservative and only invest in safe fixed income products.
This is happening globally. For more on this, click here for ?The 1% and the Bond Market?.
9) Inflation? Come again? What?s that? Commodity, energy, precious metal, and food prices are disappearing up their own exhaust pipes. Industrial revolutions produce deflationary centuries, and we have just entered the third one in history (after no. 1, steam, and no. 2, electricity).
10) The psychological effects of the 2008-2009 crash were so frightening that many investors will never recover. That means more bond buying and less buying of all other assets. I can?t tell you how many investment advisors I know who have converted their practices to bond only ones.
Having said all of that, I am selling bonds short once again on the next substantial rally. Call me an ornery, stubborn, stupid old man.
But hey, even a blind squirrel finds an acorn sometimes.
Am I Stubborn or Just Plain Stupid?
Ignore the lessons of history, and the cost to your portfolio will be great. Especially if you are a bond trader!
In Britain they celebrated something unusual last year. The government reported the first year on year decline in consumer prices in 54 years (see chart below).
In fact, prices for the things they buy day to day were 0.1% lower than they were 12 months before.
Meet deflation, up front and ugly.
If you looked at a chart for data from the United States, they would not be much different, where consumer prices are showing a feeble 0.4% YOY price gain. This is miles away from the Federal Reserve?s own 2% annual inflation target.
We are not just having a deflationary year or decade. We may be having a deflationary century.
If so, it will not be the first one.
The 19th century saw continuously falling prices as well. Read the financial history of the United States, and it is beset with continuous stock market crashes, economic crisis, and liquidity shortages.
The union movement sprung largely from the need to put a break on falling wages created by perennial labor oversupply and sub living wages.
Enjoy riding the New York subway? Workers paid 10 cents an hour built it 120 years ago. It couldn?t be constructed today, as other more modern cities have discovered. The cost would be wildly prohibitive.
The causes of 19th century price collapse were easy to discern. A technology boom sparked an industrial revolution that reduced the labor content of end products by ten to hundredfold.
Instead of employing a 100 women for a day to make 100 spools of thread, a single man operating a machine could do the job in an hour.
The dramatic productivity gains swept through then developing economies like a hurricane. The jump from steam to electric power during the last quarter of the century took manufacturing gains a quantum leap forward.
If any of this sounds familiar, it is because we are now seeing a repeat of the exact same impact of accelerating technology. Machines and software are replacing human workers faster than their ability to retrain for new professions.
This is why there has been no net gain in middle class wages for the past 30 years. It is the cause of the structural high U-6 ?discouraged workers? employment rate, as well as the millions of millennials still living in parents? basements.
Instead of steam and electric power, it is now the internet, cheap computing power, global broadband, and software that is swelling the ranks of the jobless.
What?s more, technology gains are now going hyperbolic to a degree never seen before in civilization.
To the above add the huge advances now being made in healthcare, biotechnology, genetic engineering, DNA based computing, and big data solutions to problems.
If all the diseases in the world were wiped out, a probability within 30 years, how many jobs would that destroy?
Probably tens of millions.
So the deflation that we have been suffering in recent years isn?t likely to end any time soon. In fact, it is just getting started.
Why am I interested in this issue? Of course, I always enjoy analyzing and predicting the far future, using the unfolding of the last half century as my guide. Then I have to live long enough to see if I?m right.
I did nail the rise of eight track tapes over six track ones, the victory of VHS over Betamax, the ascendance of Microsoft operating systems over OS2, and then the conquest of Apple over Microsoft. So I have a pretty good track record on this front.
For bond traders especially, there are far reaching consequences of a deflationary century. It means that there will be no bond market crash, as many are predicting, just a slow grind up in long term interest rates instead.
Amazingly the top in rates in the coming cycle may only reach the bottom of past cycles, around 3% for ten-year Treasury bonds (TLT), (TBT).
The soonest that we could possibly see real wage rises will be when a generational demographic labor shortage kicks in during the 2020?s. That could be a decade off.
I say this not as a casual observer, but as a trader who is constantly active in an entire range of debt instruments.
So the bottom line here is that there is additional room for bond prices to fall and yields to rise. But not by that much, given historical comparisons. Think of singles, not home runs.
It really will be just a trade. Thought you?d like to know.
Try This at Your Peril
I am once again writing this report from a first class sleeping cabin on Amtrak?s California Zephyr.
By day, I have two comfortable seats facing each other next to a panoramic window. At night, they fold into bunk beds, a single and a double. There is a shower, but only Houdini could get in and out of it.
I am not Houdini, so I go downstairs to use the larger public showers.
We are now pulling away from Chicago?s Union Station, leaving its hurried commuters, buskers, panhandlers, and majestic great halls behind. I love this building as a monument to American accomplishment.
I am headed for Emeryville, California, just across the bay from San Francisco. That gives me only 56 hours to complete this report.
I tip my porter, Raymond, $100 in advance to make sure everything goes well during the long adventure, and to keep me up to date with the onboard gossip.
The rolling and pitching of the car is causing my fingers to dance all over the keyboard. Spellchecker can catch most of the mistakes, but not all of them.
Thank goodness for small algorithms.
As both broadband and cell phone coverage are unavailable along most of the route, I have to rely on frenzied searches during stops at major stations along the way to chase down data points.
You know those cool maps in the Verizon stores that show the vast coverage of their cell phone networks? They are complete BS.
Who knew that 95% of America is off the grid? That explains a lot about our country today. I have posted many of my better photos from the trip below, although there is only so much you can do from a moving train and an iPhone 6.
After making the rounds with strategists, portfolio managers, and hedge fund traders, I can confirm that 2015 was one of the toughest to trade for careers lasting 30, 40, or 50 years. Even the stay-at-home index players had their heads handed to them.
With the Dow gaining 3.1% in 2015, and S&P 500 almost dead unchanged, this was a year of endless frustration. Volatility fell to the floor, staying at a monotonous 12% for eight boring consecutive months before spiking repeatedly many times to as high as 52%. Most hedge funds lagged the index by miles.
My Trade Alert Service, hauled in an astounding 38.8% profit, at the high was up 48.7%, and has become the talk of the hedge fund industry.
If you think I spend too much time absorbing conspiracy theories from the Internet, let me give you a list of the challenges I see financial markets facing in the coming year:
The Four Key Variables for 2016
1) Will the Fed raise interest rates more or not?
2) Will China?s emerging economy see a hard or soft landing?
3) Will Japanese and European quantitative easing increase, or remain the same?
4) Will oil bottom and stay low, or bounce hard?
Here are your answers to the above: no, soft, more later, bounce hard later.
There you go! That?s all the research you have to do for the coming year. Everything else is a piece of cake.
The Ten Highlights of 2015
1) Stocks will finish higher in 2016, almost certainly more than the previous year, somewhere in the 5% range and 7% with dividends. Cheap energy, a recovering global economy, and 2-3% GDP growth, will be the drivers. However, this year we have a headwind of rising interest rates and falling multiples.
2) Expect stocks to take a 15% dive. That gives us a -15% to +5% trading range for the year. Volatility will remain permanently higher, with several large spikes up. That means you are going to have to pedal harder to earn your crust of bread in 2016.
3) The Treasury bond market will modestly grind down, anticipating the next 25 basis point rate rise from the Federal Reserve, and then the next one after that.
4) The yen will lose another 5% against the dollar.
5) The Euro will fall another 5%, doing its best to hit parity with the greenback, with the assistance of beleaguered continental governments.
6) Oil stays in a $30-$60 range, showering the economy with hundreds of billions of dollars worth of de facto tax cuts.
7) Gold finally bottoms at $1,000 after one more final flush, then rallies $250. (My jeweler was right, again).
8) Commodities finally bottom out, thanks to new found strength in the global economy, and begin a modest recovery.
9) Residential real estate has made its big recovery, and will grind up slowly from here for years.
10) The 2016 presidential election will eat up immense amounts of media and research time, but will have absolutely no impact on financial markets. Give your money to charity instead.
The Thumbnail Portfolio
Equities - Long. A rising but high volatility year takes the S&P 500 up to 2,200. Technology, biotech, energy, solar, consumer discretionary, and financials lead. Energy should find its bottom, but later than sooner.
Bonds - Short. Down for the entire year, but not by much, with long periods of stagnation.
Foreign Currencies - Short. The US dollar maintains its bull trend, especially against the Yen and the Euro, but won't gain nearly as much as in 2015.
Commodities - Long. A China recovery takes them up eventually.
Precious Metals - Buy as close to $1,000 as you can. We are overdue for a trading rally.
Agriculture - Long. El Nino in the north and droughts in Latin American should add up to higher prices.
Real estate - Long. Multifamily up, commercial up, single family homes up small.
1) The Economy - Fortress America
I think real US economic growth will come in at the 2.5%-3% range.
With a generational demographic drag continuing for five more years, don?t expect more than that. Big spenders, those in the 46-50 age group, don?t return in larger numbers until 2022.
But this negative will be offset by a plethora of positives, like hyper-accelerating technology, global expansion, and the lingering effects of the Fed?s massive five year quantitative easing.
US corporate profits will keep pushing to new all time highs. But this year we won?t be held back by the collapsing economies of Europe, China, and Japan, which subtracted about 0.5% from American economic growth, nor weak energy.
US Corporate earnings will probably come in at $130 a share for the S&P 500, a gain of 10% over the previous year. During the last six years, we have seen the most dramatic increase in earnings in history, taking them to all-time highs.
Technology and dramatically lower energy costs are the principal sources of profit increases, which will continue their inexorable improvements. Think of more machines and software replacing people.
You know all of those hundreds of billions raised from technology IPO?s in 2015? Most of that is getting plowed right back into new start ups, increasing the rate of technology improvements even further, and the productivity gains that come with it.
We no longer have the free lunch of zero interest rates. But the cost of money will rise so slowly that it will barely impact profits. Deflation is here to stay. Watch the headline jobless rate fall below 5% to a full employment economy.
Keep close tabs on the weekly jobless claims that come out at 8:30 AM Eastern every Thursday for a good read as to whether the financial markets will head in a ?RISK ON? or ?RISK OFF? direction.
A Rocky Mountain Moose Family2) Equities (SPX), (QQQ), (AAPL), (XLF), (BAC), (EEM),(EWZ), (RSX), (PIN), (FXI), (TUR), (EWY), (EWT), (IDX)
For the first time in seven years, earnings multiples are going to fall, but not by much. That is the only possible outcome in a world with rising interest rates, however modestly.
If multiples fall by 5%, from the current 18X to 17.1X, profits increase by 10%, and you throw in a 2% dividend, you should net out a 7% return by the end of the year.
S&P 500 earnings fell by 6% in 2015, but take out oil and they grew by 5.6%. In 2016, energy will be a lesser drag, or not at all. That makes my 10% target doable.
That is not much of a return with which to take on a lot of risk. But remember, in a near zero interest rate world, there is nothing else to buy.
This is not an outrageous expectation, given the 10-22 earnings multiple range that we have enjoyed during the last 30 years.
The market currently trades around fair value, and no market in history ever peaked out here. An overshoot to the upside, often a big one, is mandatory. Yet, that is years off.
After all, my friend, Janet Yellen, is paying you to buy stock with cheap money, so why not? Borrowing money at close to zero and investing in 2% dividend paying stocks has become the world?s largest carry trade.
Rising interest rates will have one additional worrying impact on stock prices. They will pare back mergers and acquisitions and corporate buy backs in 2016.
Together these were the sources of all new net buying of stocks in 2015, some $5.5 trillion worth. Call it financial engineering, but the market loves it.
Although energy looks terrible now, it could well be the top-performing sector by the end of the year, to be followed by commodities.
Certainly, every hedge fund and activist investor out there is undergoing a crash course on oil fundamentals. After a 13-year expansion of leverage in the industry, it is ripe for a cleanout.
Solar stocks will continue on a tear, now that the 30% federal investment tax subsidy has been extended by five more years. Look at Solar City (SCTY), First Solar (FSLR), and the solar basket ETF (TAN). Revenues are rocketing and costs are falling.
After spending a year in the penalty box, look for small cap stocks to outperform. These are the biggest beneficiaries of cheap energy and low interest rates.
Share prices will deliver anything but a straight-line move. Expect a couple more 10% plus corrections in 2015, and for the Volatility Index (VIX) to revisit $30 multiple times. The higher prices rise, the more common these will become.
Frozen Headwaters of the Colorado River 3) Bonds ?(TLT), (TBT), (JNK), (PHB), (HYG), (PCY), (MUB), (HCP), (KMP), (LINE)
Amtrak needs to fill every seat in the dining car, so you never know who you will get paired with for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
There was the Vietnam vet Phantom jet pilot who now refused to fly because he was treated so badly at airports. A young couple desperate to get out of Omaha could only afford seats as far as Salt Lake City, sitting up all night. I paid for their breakfast.
A retired British couple was circumnavigating the entire US in a month on a ?See America Pass.? Mennonites returning home by train because their religion forbade airplanes.
I have to confess that I am leaning towards the ?one and done? school of thought with regards to the Fed?s interest rate policy. We may see a second 25 basis point rise in June, but only if the economy takes off like a rocket and international concerns disappear, an unlikely probability.
If you told me that US GDP growth was 2.5%, unemployment was at a ten year low at 5.0%, and energy prices had just plunged by 68%, I would have pegged the ten-year Treasury bond yield at 6.0%. Yet here we are at 2.25%.
We clearly are seeing a brave new world.
Global QE added to a US profit glut has created more money than the fixed income markets can absorb.
Virtually every hedge fund manager and institutional investor got bonds wrong last year, expecting rates to rise. I was among them, but that is no excuse.
Fixed income turned out to be a winner for me in 2015, as I sold short every bond price spike from the summer onward. It worked like a charm.
You might as well take your traditional economic books and throw them in the trash. Apologies to John Maynard Keynes, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Paul Samuelson.
The reasons for the debacle are myriad, but global deflation is the big one. With ten year German bunds yielding a paltry 62 basis points, and Japanese bonds paying a paltry 26 basis points, US Treasuries are looking like a steal.
To this, you can add the greater institutional bond holding requirements of Dodd-Frank, a balancing US budget deficit, a virile US dollar, the commodity price collapse, and an enormous embedded preference for investors to keep buying whatever worked yesterday.
For more depth on the perennial strength of bonds, please click here for ?Ten Reasons Why I?m Wrong on Bonds?.
Bond investors today get an unbelievable bad deal. If they hang on to the longer maturities, they will get back only 80 cents worth of purchasing power at maturity for every dollar they invest a decade down the road.
But institutions and individuals will grudgingly lock in these appalling returns because they believe that the potential losses in any other asset class will be worse.
The problem is that driving eighty miles per hour while only looking in the rear view mirror can be hazardous to your financial health.
While much of the current political debate centers around excessive government borrowing, the markets are telling us the exact opposite.
A 2% handle on the ten-year yield is proof to me that there is a Treasury bond shortage, and that the government is not borrowing too much money, but not enough.
There is another factor supporting bonds that no one is looking at. The concentration of wealth with the 1% has a side effect of pouring money into bonds and keeping it there. Their goal is asset protection and nothing else.
These people never sell for tax reasons, so the money stays there for generations. It is not recycled into the rest of the economy, as conservative economists insist. As this class controls the bulk of investable assets, this forestalls any real bond market crash, at lest for the near term.
So what will 2016 bring us? I think that the erroneous forecast of higher yields I made last year will finally occur this year, and we will start to chip away at the bond market bubble?s granite edifice.
I am not looking for a free fall in price and a spike up in rates, just a move to a new higher trading range.
We could ratchet back up to a 3% yield, but not much higher than that. This would enable the inverse Treasury bond bear ETF (TBT) to reverse its dismal 2015 performance, taking it from $46 back up to $60.
You might have to wait for your grandchildren to start trading before we see a return of 12% Treasuries, last seen in the early eighties. I probably won?t live that long.
Reaching for yield suddenly went out of fashion for many investors, which is typical at market tops. As a result, junk bonds (JNK) and (HYG), REITS (HCP), and master limited partnerships (AMLP) are showing their first value in five years.
There is also emerging market sovereign debt to consider (PCY). If oil and commodities finally bottom, these high yielding bonds should take off on a tear.
This asset class was hammered last year, so we are now facing a rare entry point.
There is a good case for sticking with munis. No matter what anyone says, taxes are going up, and when they do, this will increase tax-free muni values.
The collapse of the junk bond market suddenly made credit quality a big deal last year. What is better than lending to the government, unless you happen to live in Puerto Rico or Illinois.
So if you hate paying taxes, go ahead and buy this exempt paper, but only with the expectation of holding it to maturity. Liquidity could get pretty thin along the way, and mark to markets could be shocking.
Be sure to consult with a local financial advisor to max out the state, county, and city tax benefits.
One question I always get asked at lunches, conferences, and lectures is what is going to happen to the budget deficit?
The short answer is that it disappears in 2018 with no change in current law, thanks to steady growth in tax revenues and no big new wars.
And Social Security? It will be fully funded by 2030, thanks to a huge demographic tailwind provided by the addition of 86 million Millennials to the tax rolls.
A bump up in US GDP growth from 2% to 4% during the 2020?s will also be a huge help, again, provided we don?t start any more wars.
It looks like I am going to be able to collect after all.
A Visit to the 19th Century4) Foreign Currencies (FXE), (EUO), (FXC), (FXA), (YCS), (FXY), (CYB)
Without much movement in interest rates in 2016, you can expect the same for foreign currencies.
Last year, we saw never ending expectations of aggressive quantitative easing by foreign central banks, which never really showed. What we did get, was always disappointing.
The decade long bull market in the greenback continues, but not by much. You can forget about those dramatic double digit gains the dollar made against the Euro at the beginning of last year, which we absolutely nailed.
The fundamental play for the Japanese yen is still from the short side. But don?t expect movement until we see another new leg of quantitative easing from the Bank of Japan. It could be a long wait.
The problems in the Land of the Rising Sun are almost too numerous to count: the world?s highest debt to GDP ratio, a horrific demographic problem, flagging export competitiveness against neighboring China and South Korea, and the world?s lowest developed country economic growth rate.
The dramatic sell off we saw in the Japanese currency since December, 2012 is the beginning of what I believe will be a multi decade, move down. Look for ?130 to the dollar sometime in 2016, and ?150 further down the road.
I have many friends in Japan looking for an overshoot to ?200. Take every 3% pullback in the greenback as a gift to sell again.
With the US having the world?s strongest major economy, its central bank is, therefore, most likely to continue raising rates the fastest.
That translates into a strong dollar, as interest rate differentials are far and away the biggest decider of the direction in currencies. So the dollar will remain strong against the Australian and Canadian dollars as well.
For a sleeper, use the next plunge in emerging markets to buy the Chinese Yuan ETF (CYB) for your back book. Now that the Yuan is an IMF reserve currency, it has attained new respectability.
But don?t expect more than single digit returns. The Middle Kingdom will move heaven and earth in order to keep its appreciation modest to maintain their crucial export competitiveness.
5) Commodities (FCX), (VALE), (MOO), (DBA), (MOS), (MON), (AGU), (POT), (PHO), (FIW), (CORN), (WEAT), (SOYB), (JJG)
There isn?t a strategist out there not giving thanks for not loading up on commodities in 2015, the preeminent investment disaster of the year. Those who did are now looking for jobs on Craig?s List.
It was another year of overwhelming supply meeting flagging demand, both in Europe and Asia. Blame China, the one big swing factor in the global commodity.
The Middle Kingdom is currently changing drivers of its economy, from foreign exports to domestic consumption. This will be a multi decade process, and they have $3.5 trillion in reserves to finance it.
It will still demand prodigious amounts of imported commodities, especially, oil, copper, iron ore, and coal, all of which we sell. But not as much as in the past. This trend ran head on into a decade long expansion of capacity by the industry.
The derivative equity plays here, Freeport McMoRan (FCX) and Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (VALE), have all taken an absolute pasting.
The food commodities were certainly the asset class to forget about in 2015, as perfect weather conditions and over planting produced record crops for the second year in a row, demolishing prices. The associated equity plays took the swan dive with them.
Not even the arrival of one of the biggest El Nino events in history could bail them out.
However, the ags are still a tremendous long term Malthusian play. The harsh reality here is that the world is making people faster than the food to feed them, the global population jumping from 7 billion to 9 billion by 2050.
Half of that increase comes in countries unable to feed themselves today, largely in the Middle East. The idea here is to use any substantial weakness, as we are seeing now, to build long positions that will double again if global warming returns in the summer, or if the Chinese get hungry.
The easy entry points here are with the corn (CORN), wheat (WEAT), and soybean (SOYB) ETF?s. You can also play through (MOO) and (DBA), and the stocks Mosaic (MOS), Monsanto (MON), Potash (POT), and Agrium (AGU).
The grain ETF (JJG) is another handy fund. Though an unconventional commodity play, the impending shortage of water will make the energy crisis look like a cakewalk. You can participate in this most liquid of assets with the ETF?s (PHO) and (FIW).
Snow Angel on the Continental Divide6) Energy (DIG), (RIG), (USO), (DUG), (DIG), (UNG), (USO), (OXY), (XLE), (X)
You are now an oil trader, even if you didn?t realize it. Yikes!
The short-term direction of the price of Texas tea will be the principal driver for the prices of all asset classes, as it was for the 2015.
The smartest thing I did in 2015 was to ignore the professional traders, who called the bottom in oil monthly, based on key technical levels.
Instead, I hung on every word uttered by my old drilling buddies in the Barnett Shale, who only saw endless supply.
Guess whom I?ll be paying attention to this year?
I expect oil to bottom in 2016, and then launch a ferocious short covering rally. But when and where is anyone?s guess.
If energy legends John Hamm, John Arnold, and T. Boone Pickens have no idea where the absolute low will be, who am I to second-guess them?
When that happens, a trillion dollars will pour out of the sidelines into this troubled sector. Energy shares should be top-performers in 2016.
That makes energy Master Limited Partnerships, now yielding 10%-15%, especially interesting in this low yield world. Since no one in the industry knows which issuers are going bankrupt, you have to take a basket approach and buy all of them.
The Alerian MLP ETF (AMLP) does this for you in an ETF format (click here for details). At its low this fund was down by 41% this year. The last printed annualized yield I saw was 10%. That kind of return will cover up a lot of sins.
Our train has moved over to a siding to permit a freight train to pass, as it has priority on the Amtrak system. Three Burlington Northern engines are heaving to pull over 100 black, brand new tank cars, each carrying 30,000 gallons of oil from the fracking fields in North Dakota.
There is another tank car train right behind it. No wonder Warren Buffet tap dances to work every day, as he owns the railroad.
Who knew that a new, younger Saudi king would ramp up production to once unimaginable levels and crush prices, turning the energy world upside down?
They aren?t targeting American frackers, who at 1 million barrels a day in a 92 million barrel a day demand world barely move the needle. Their goal is to destroy the economies of enemies Iran, Yemen, Russia, and of course ISIS, which need high prices to stay in business.
So far, so good.
Cheaper energy will bestow new found competitiveness on US companies that will enable them to claw back millions of jobs from China in dozens of industries.
At current prices, the energy savings works out to an eye popping $550 per American driver per year!
This will end our structural unemployment faster than demographic realities would otherwise permit.
We have a major new factor this year in considering the price of energy. The nuclear deal with Iran promises to add 500,000 to 1 million barrels a day to an already glutted global market. Iraq is ramping up production as well.
We are also seeing relentless improvements on the energy conservation front with more electric vehicles, high mileage conventional cars, and newly efficient building. Anyone of these inputs is miniscule on its own. But add them all together and you have a game changer.
Enjoy cheap oil while it lasts because it won?t last forever. American rig counts are already falling off a cliff and will eventually engineer a price recovery.
As is always the case, the cure for low prices is low prices. But we may never see $100/barrel crude again.
Add to your long term portfolio (DIG), Exxon Mobil (XOM), Cheniere Energy (LNG), the energy sector ETF (XLE), Conoco Phillips (COP), and Occidental Petroleum (OXY).
Skip natural gas (UNG) price plays and only go after volume plays, because the discovery of a new 100-year supply from ?fracking? and horizontal drilling in shale formations is going to overhang this subsector for a very long time.
It is a basic law of economics that cheaper prices bring greater demand and growing volumes, which have to be transported. However, major reforms are required in Washington before use of this molecule goes mainstream.
These could be your big trades of 2016, but expect to endure some pain first, nor to get much sleep at night.
7) Precious Metals (GLD), (DGP), (SLV), (PPTL), (PALL)
The train has added extra engines at Denver, so now we may begin the long laboring climb up the Eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains.
On a steep curve, we pass along an antiquated freight train of hopper cars filled with large boulders. The porter tells me this train is welded to the tracks to create a windbreak. Once, a gust howled out of the pass so swiftly that it blew a train over on to its side.
In the snow filled canyons we sight a family of three moose, a huge herd of elk, and another group of wild mustangs. The engineer informs us that a rare bald eagle is flying along the left side of the train. It?s a good omen for the coming year.
We also see countless abandoned 19th century gold mines and the broken down wooden trestles leading to them, relics of previous precious metals busts. So it is timely here to speak about precious metals.
As long as the world is clamoring for paper assets like stocks and bonds, gold is just another shiny rock. After all, who needs an insurance policy if you are going to live forever?
We have already broken $1,040 once, and a test of $1,000 seems in the cards before a turnaround ensues. There are more hedge fund redemptions and stop losses to go. The bear case has the barbarous relic plunging all the way down to $700.
But the long-term bull case is still there. Gold is not dead; it is just resting.
If you forgot to buy gold at $35, $300, or $800, another entry point is setting up for those who, so far, have missed the gravy train. The precious metals have to work off a severely, decade old overbought condition before we make substantial new highs.
Remember, this is the asset class that takes the escalator up and the elevator down, and sometimes the window.
If the institutional world devotes just 5% of their assets to a weighting in gold, and an emerging market central bank bidding war for gold reserves continues, it has to fly to at least $2,300, the inflation adjusted all-time high, or more.
This is why emerging market central banks step in as large buyers every time we probe lower prices. China and India emerged as major buyers of gold in the final quarter of 2015.
They were joined by Russia, which was looking for non-dollar investments to dodge US economic and banking sanctions.
For me, that pegs the range for 2016 at $1,000-$1,250. ETF players can look at the 1X (GLD) or the 2X leveraged gold (DGP).
I would also be using the next bout of weakness to pick up the high beta, more volatile precious metal, silver (SLV), which I think could hit $50 once more, and eventually $100.
What will be the metals to own in 2015? Palladium (PALL) and platinum (PPLT), which have their own auto related long term fundamentals working on their behalf, would be something to consider on a dip.
With US auto production at 18 million units a year and climbing, up from a 9 million low in 2009, any inventory problems will easily get sorted out.
Would You Believe This is a Blue State?8) Real Estate (ITB)
The majestic snow covered Rocky Mountains are behind me. There is now a paucity of scenery, with the endless ocean of sagebrush and salt flats of Northern Nevada outside my window, so there is nothing else to do but write.
My apologies to readers in Wells, Elko, Battle Mountain, and Winnemucca, Nevada.
It is a route long traversed by roving banks of Indians, itinerant fur traders, the Pony Express, my own immigrant forebears in wagon trains, the transcontinental railroad, the Lincoln Highway, and finally US Interstate 80.
There is no doubt that there is a long-term recovery in real estate underway. We are probably 5 years into a 17-year run at the next peak in 2028.
But the big money has been made here over the past two years, with some red hot markets, like San Francisco, soaring. If you live within commuting distance of Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG), or Facebook (FB) headquarters in California, you are looking at multiple offers, bidding wars, and prices at all time highs.
While the sales figures have recently been weak, it is a shortage of supply that is the cause. You can?t sell what you don?t have, at least in the real estate business.
From here on, I expect a slow grind up well into the 2020?s. If you live in the rest of the country, we are talking about small, single digit gains. The consequence of pernicious deflation is that home prices appreciate at a glacial pace.
At least, it has stopped going down, which has been great news for the financial industry.
There are only three numbers you need to know in the housing market for the next 20 years: there are 80 million baby boomers, 65 million Generation Xer?s who follow them, and 86 million in the generation after that, the Millennials.
The boomers have been unloading dwellings to the Gen Xer?s since prices peaked in 2007. But there are not enough of the latter, and three decades of falling real incomes mean that they only earn a fraction of what their parents made. That's what caused the financial crisis.
If they have prospered, banks won?t lend to them. Brokers used to say that their market was all about ?location, location, location?. Now it is ?financing, financing, financing?.
Banks have gone back to the old standard of only lending money to people who don?t need it. But expect to put up your first-born child as collateral, and bring in your entire extended family in as cosigners if you want to get a bank loan.?
There is a happy ending to this story. Millennials, now aged 21-37 are already starting to kick in as the dominant buyers in the market. They are just starting to transition from 30% to 70% of all new buyers in this market. The Great Millennial Migration to the suburbs has begun.
As a result, the price of single family homes should rocket tenfold during the 2020?s, as they did during the 1970?s and the 1990?s, when similar demographic influences were at play.
This will happen in the context of a coming labor shortfall and rising standards of living. Inflation returns.
Rising rents are accelerating this trend. Renters now pay 35% of the gross income, compared to only 18% for owners, and less when multiple deductions and tax subsidies are taken into account.
Remember too, that by then, the US will not have built any new houses in large numbers in 10 years. We are still operating at only a quarter of the peak rate. Thanks to the Great Recession, the construction of five million new homes has gone missing in action.
That makes a home purchase now particularly attractive for the long term, to live in, and not to speculate with.
You will boast to your grandchildren how little you paid for your house, as my grandparents once did to me ($18,000 for a four bedroom brownstone in Brooklyn in 1922).
Quite honestly, of all the asset classes mentioned in this report, purchasing your abode is probably the single best investment you can make now.
If you borrow at a 3% 5/1 ARM rate, and the long-term inflation rate is 3%, then over time you will get your house for free.
How hard is that to figure out?
Crossing the Bridge to Home Sweet Home9) Postscript
We have pulled into the station at Truckee in the midst of a howling blizzard.
My loyal staff have made the 20 mile trek from my beachfront estate at Incline Village to welcome me to California with a couple of hot breakfast burritos and a chilled bottle of Dom Perignon Champagne, which has been resting in a nearby snowbank. I am thankfully spared from taking my last meal with Amtrak.
After that, it was over legendary Donner Pass, and then all downhill from the Sierras, across the Central Valley, and into the Sacramento River Delta.
Well, that?s all for now. We?ve just passed the Pacific mothball fleet moored in the Sacramento River Delta and we?re crossing the Benicia Bridge. The pressure increase caused by an 8,200 foot descent from Donner Pass has crushed my water bottle.
The Golden Gate Bridge and the soaring spire of the Transamerica Building are just around the next bend across San Francisco Bay.
A storm has blown through, leaving the air crystal clear and the bay as flat as glass. It is time for me to unplug my Macbook Pro and iPhone 6, pick up my various adapters, and pack up.
We arrive in Emeryville 45 minutes early. With any luck, I can squeeze in a ten mile night hike up Grizzly Peak and still get home in time to watch the opener for Downton Abbey's final season.
I reach the ridge just in time to catch a spectacular pastel sunset over the Pacific Ocean. The omens are there. It is going to be another good year.
I?ll shoot you a Trade Alert whenever I see a window open on any of the trades above.
Good trading in 2016!
John Thomas
The Mad Hedge Fund Trader
The Omens Are Good for 2016!
ECB president Mario Draghi certainly let go of a lead balloon today.
Instead of announcing a 20 basis point cut in Euro interest rates, we only got 10.
The world blew apart.
The Euro rocketed against the dollar some 3.5% in minutes, the best gain since 2009, and one of the top ten moves of all time for the beleaguered continental currency.
US Treasury bonds crashed, giving up $3, and popping yields from 2.18% to 2.32%. Stocks fell to pieces globally. The Volatility Index (VIX) went through he roof.
Never mind that Draghi announced an extension of European quantitative easing by six more months to March 2017, or that the number of qualified securities for the central bank could buy was expanded.
All traders wanted was one more rally before yearend into which they could unload their sizable Euro shorts. When they didn?t get it, they panicked and stampeded for the exits.
It was your classic flash fire in the movie theater.
This is what happens when positioning in financial markets gets too one-sided. Risk managers talk about too many passengers in one side of the canoe. Everyone gets to go swimming.
That is why I quit rolling down the strikes on my Euro shorts three weeks ago, loathe to sell to much at the bottom. My one remaining short Euro position successfully weathered today?s spike, is still in the money, and only has ten trading until expiration.
The important takeaway here is that today?s moves were entirely technical, and had nothing to do with fundamentals, which always win out over time.
The meteoric move in the Euro did not occur because of a sudden burst of strength in the European economy. It didn?t take place because the ECB is raising rates.
So, I think this entire move is bogus. It is a typical December event, where all of the hot money wants to get out of the market within the next four weeks so they can close their books and start over again next year.
It is also a great lesson on what happens when you have too many hedge fund chasing the same few trades. It always ends in tears.
Which leads me to believe that the dramatic moves we saw today will reverse themselves shortly. Stocks (SPY) will soar, bonds (TLT) will rise modestly, and the Euro (FXE), (EUO) will take the express train downtown. The (VIX) will fade, again.
These gyrations could possibly take place as soon as Friday?s November nonfarm payroll report. All we need is a number north of 200,000, and it will be off to the raises once again.
I am so convinced of my convictions that I bought the Velocity Shares Daily Inverse VIX ETF (XIV) 30 minutes before the close (that?s the latest I can send out a Trade Alert and expect readers to have time to open and execute).
USE THE HEDGE FUNDS? PAIN FOR YOUR GAIN!
If you still hold a Euro short, keep it.
If you are underweight stocks, here is another fine entry point.
This is especially true for hedged European stocks (HEDJ), which have just opened an excellent entry point.
The (SPY) is only down 2.1% from its recent high, and off 3.7% from its all time high, hardly the stuff of bear markets, or even corrections.
Surprise!My friend, Texan money manager Mike Robertson, asked me the other day if there was one asset class that I truly despised.
I didn?t hesitate: bonds.
In fact, fixed income investments are about to regain the nickname they earned during the 1980?s: ?certificates of wealth confiscation.?
That leaves me within a hair?s breadth of pulling the trigger on some new short positions in fixed income instruments. My hedge fund buddies are lining up varies short plays here, like clay ducks in a shooting match.
With the ten year Treasury bond yield at a microscopic 2.30%, and 3.06% for the 30 year, you have a classic ?heads I win, tales, you lose? trade. Best case, you break even over the next decade. Worst case, you lose half or more of your capital.
The US has no history of excessive debt, except during WWII, when it briefly exceeded 100% of GDP. That abruptly changed in 2001, when George W. Bush took office.
In short order, the new president implemented massive tax cuts, provided expanded Medicare benefits for seniors, and launched two wars, causing budgets deficits to explode at the fastest rate in history.
To accomplish this, strict 'pay as you go' rules enforced by the previous Clinton administration, were scrapped. The net net was to double the national debt to $10.5 trillion in a mere eight years.
Another $5 trillion in Keynesian reflationary deficit spending by President Obama since then has taken matters from bad to worse.
This year, the national debt just nudged past our GDP at $17 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office is now forecasting that, with the current spending trajectory, total debt will reach $23 trillion by 2020, or some 160% of today's GDP, 1.6 times the WWII peak.
By then, the Treasury will have to pay a staggering $5 trillion a year just to roll over maturing debt. What's more, these figures greatly understate the severity of the problem.
They do not include another $9 trillion in debts guaranteed by the federal government, such as bonds issued by home mortgage providers, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. State and local governments owe another $3 trillion. Double interest rates, which they inevitably will, and our debt service burden doubles as well.
It is unlikely that the warring parties in Congress will kiss and make up anytime soon. It is therefore likely that the capital markets will emerge as the sole source of any fiscal discipline, with the return of the bond vigilantes.
They have already made their predatory presence known in the profligate nations of Europe, and they are expected to arrive here eventually.
Such forces have not been at play in Washington since the early 1980's, when bond yields reached 13%, and homeowners (including me) paid 18% for mortgages.
Since foreign investors hold 50% of our debt, policy responses will not be dictated by the US, but by the Mandarins in Beijing and Tokyo. They could enforce a cut back in defense spending from the current annual $700 billion.
Personally, I think the US will never recover from the debt explosions engineered by Bush and by 'deficits don't count' Vice President Chaney. The outcome has permanently lowered standards of living for middle class Americans and reduced influence on the global stage.
But I'm not going to get mad, I'm going to get even. I am going to make a killing profiting from the coming collapse of the US Treasury market through buying the leveraged short Treasury bond ETF, the (TBT).
I am sticking to my short term forecast for this fund to rise from the current $58 to $100, then $150. And that is despite a hefty and rising cost of carry of nearly 0.5% a month.
Where?s My Social Security?