The Mad Hedge Fund Trader is taking a much-needed break for the next few days to take Turkey with the expanded family in Portland, Oregon. The Trade Alerts have been going out so fast and furious that it is all starting to become a blur to me. I am going to draw the line at 70 alerts for November.
A 28-pound bird made the ultimate sacrifice, and will be accompanied with mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, potato salad, mince pie, and a fine Yamhill Chardonnay. I ate an entire pumpkin pie last night just to give my digestive system an early warning that some heavy lifting was on its way.
I am the oldest of seven of the most fractious and divided siblings on the planet, so attending these affairs is always a bit of an emotional and physical challenge. I bet many of my readers are faced with the same dilemma, and they all have my sympathy.
Suffice it to say, that we’ll be talking a lot about the only two safe subjects there are, sports and the weather. Go Niners! I can only say this much because Portland doesn’t have a football team.
I will learn that my brother who runs a trading desk at Goldman Sachs has put his new Bentley Turbo R into storage. It seems some Occupy Wall Street types have been keying it whenever he parks on the street. There is talk that the firm will go private again to dodge all of the onerous regulation of Dodd-Frank and the Volker rule.
My born again Christian sister was thrilled with the Tea Party shutdown of the federal government, and is hoping for even better things next year. I am banned from mentioning President Obama’s name in her house, or I face having to wash the roasting pan by hand.
My gay rights activist sister will be assertively arguing the case for same sex marriage and celebrating the recent victories in New York and New Jersey. For me, that means conference facilities for my strategy lunches and seminars have suddenly become abundantly available in San Francisco, now that the gay wedding business has decamped for the east coast.
A third sister married to a very pleasant fellow in Big Oil will be making the long trip from Borneo, where he is involved in offshore exploration. No doubt I will get a big serving of “peak oil” theory with my salad, along with arguments on why we should deregulate our way to more offshore energy supplies here and in Alaska. Hopefully, the local headhunters haven’t taken a trophy yet. And I mean real headhunters, not the recruiting kind.
Sister no. 4, who is making a killing in commodities in Australia, and is up to her eyeballs in iron ore, will grace us with a rare visit. She has been investing her profits in leveraged real estate holdings. Every year I tell her to dump everything because a crash is coming, and every year I am proven wrong. But past experience has taught me that the relatives who insist that real estate can never go down eventually end up moving into my basement and borrowing money from me.
My poor youngest sister, no. 5, took it on the nose in the subprime derivatives market during the crash. Fortunately, she followed my advice to hang on instead of dumping everything at the bottom for pennies. The worst of the toxic waste from those days is now selling for big premiums to investors hungry for any kind of yield.
She is the only member of the family I was not able to convince to sell her house in 2005 to duck the coming real estate collapse because she thought the nirvana would last forever. At least that is what her broker told her. Thanks to this year’s real estate boom, she is almost back up to her cost, while several refi’s have taken her cost of carry down by half.
My two Arabic speaking nephews in Army Intelligence will again delight in telling me that they can’t talk about their work or they’d have to kill me. One is about to cash out and will join thousands of other veterans looking for a civilian job. Does anyone need an Arabic speaking math major? The other one is shifting his focus away from Iraq and towards Iran. I told them their language skills will be worth a fortune in the private sector.
Another nephew returned from his third tour in Iraq with the First Marine Division without a scratch. I told him not to “re-up” this time around, as there is no future in his business.
My oldest son is now an English language professor at a government university in China. He spends his free time polishing up his Japanese, Russian, and Korean. At night, he trades the markets for his own account. Where do these kids get their interest in foreign languages anyway? Beats me. It’s true that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
My oldest daughter landed a middle school teaching job in Oakland, the murder capital of the US. The school has a 12-foot chain link fence around it, and the kids show up with fresh horror stories about their neighborhoods every day. If they get slain in the next gang war, at least they’ll go to their grave speaking proper grammar. I banned her from late night overtime, if such a thing is possible with a 28 year old.
Reading the riot act to this unruly crowd will be my spritely, but hardnosed mother, who gave up taking any crap from us a long time ago. At 85 she can still prop herself up on a cane well enough to knock down 14 out of 15 skeet with a shotgun, although we have had to move her down from a 12 gauge to a 410 because the recoil threatened brittle bones.
I am looking forward to my annual Scrabble tournament with her, paging my way through old family photo albums between turns. And yes, “Jo” is a word (a 19th century term for a young girl).
My next new research pieces will appear in the Monday, December 2 letter. That is, if I survive my relatives.
