It is ten minutes after one in the afternoon on Sunday. I am at the store. Last week was an exciting one in the markets, with many S&P cos reporting earnings including all of the tech giants. Readers may recall I had a small speculative bet on silver, with option expirations on the 17th, which I wrote about here: http://rwhadvisoryllc.com/animal-spirits-or-spirit-animal/
Sadly, my calls expired just as the trade was coming into the money, but I did get shares put to me as the price crossed $19 and have enjoyed the gains on the way up. I maintain my long position in silver and continue to accumulate physical at the store. I don’t really have a price target at which I will sell. I view this, like gold and #bitcoin, as an easy trade for the foreseeable future and will probably only sell for reasons of necessity. If we see $48, I will probably take some profits and reallocate. Recall that I took only a very small position.
I should also follow up on this note I posted in between blog entries: http://rwhadvisoryllc.com/note-to-self-when-to-sell-dollars/ . Since then, the dollar has, in fact, dropped below 94.5. In fact, is reached about 92.64 before turning around to end the week at 93.46. I have dutifully reviewed my dollar long position and left it in place. I have not previously disclosed or discussed my dollar long position, so let me start with that.
I am fundamentally in the camp which says the dollar is going to go up, and will become very strong, i.e. the deflationary camp. I have found strong thinking on both sides of the inflation/deflation debate, and I squirm a little knowing how smart some of the people are saying that the dollar is crashing, but when I weigh these arguments on my own scales I have assayed that the dollar will experience a very strong rise before any final capitulation, should final capitulation occur. Also for the record, I think final capitulation will occur, just not now and not next. For insights into one of the strongest influencers on my long dollar thinking follow @jeffsnider_aip on Twitter and watch his Eurodollar university series on youtube: https://youtu.be/P0q7W9Hqk0M
But that isn’t the only reason I went long USD. I am thinking of it as a little bit of a paired trade with a bullish spread on CVX. I think we will be seeing some real volatility in oil over the next 12 to 36 months, ultimately with much higher overall prices. CVX, which was hammered after a negative earnings report last week, is a business I am familiar with and have traded or owned in the past. I expect the volatility in the dollar to show its reflection, both positively and negatively, in the overall stock performance of CVX. In the longer term I am expecting to shed my dollar long, and in the meanwhile look for gains and losses to partially off-set between these two trades. I don’t expect it to be a very direct kind of hedge. Just a little bit of a paired trade. I will be looking for USD to reach at least 104 before I think about selling.
Here are the details on my CVX spread:
I was able to spend some quality time with the earnings release by NRZ this week, but since I have already carried on quite a bit, I will post my thoughts separately. PennyMac will release earnings this coming week, currently scheduled for August 6th and I am looking forward to hearing what they have to say. Broadly, for this group of companies, my themes are:
- Transferring the bag, i.e. – shifting shares to public float, insider selling, loading up on debt, special bonuses and payouts to executives, etc.,
- The attendant pumping behaviors that go with (1), above, especially an emphasis on the current and next quarterly outcomes, which will all be very strong, a reluctance to recognize known or knowable costs and impairments in the current period and an unwillingness to acknowledge the potential severity of our current economic situation,
- The lack of self-awareness, avoidance or denial of the fact that huge profits are currently being privatized at the cost of taxpayers due to government manipulation of the markets and nationalization of mortgage banking risk, while privatizing profits, and
- The structural weakness and obsolescence of residential loan servicing and correspondent lending as activities at all.
I will look forward to digging in deeper on those themes this week. Meanwhile, stay informed with these two fantastic podcasts from this past week (I am not compensated in any way for posting these links):
Pomp Podcast #351: Roger Ver on Personal Freedom and the Early Days of Bitcoin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9oC_goIX8I&feature=youtu.be
Danielle DiMartino Booth with Jeffery Gundlach
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQQA74TtWao
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Final thought, and it is a difficult one: as of August 1 we had about 155,000 covid-19 related deaths in the United States. This has played out almost exactly as I had guessed when I wrote this: http://rwhadvisoryllc.com/another-blog-post-about-covid-19/ . Now we can see with hindsight that it has coalesced in the public consciousness only very slowly, and in the face of unimaginable denial. And arguably, sadly, this amount of death has not yet been sufficient to fully bring about that coalescence, as politicians, press, and common people all battle over every aspect of the disease and our response, leaving us without a uniform plan. Have we got a long way to run? Yes.