Category: Stockie Dokie

Matein Khalidt is significant that President Trump, despite his bluff and brinkmanship with 25 percent tariff threats against Mexico and Canada, chose only to impose a 10 percent tariff on China.China is Washington’s only real peer competitor in great power realpolitik and its preeminent rival in Cold War 2.0.A 10 percent tariff is not a threat to global economic stability as would have been the 60 percent tariff Trump had threatened to impose in the election campaign. President Xi’s response to the 10

Matein KhalidTrump's vision of Gaza as a "riviera of the Middle East" at his press conference with Netanyahu, whose IDF warplanes, drones and tanks just butchered 45,000 Gazans is as deranged as it is surreal. Trump views Gaza as a New York real estate development opportunity as if he was gentrifying Spanish Harlem or the Bronx. I can imagine his zest at the idea of Trump Towers and Trump branded golf courses sprouting up all over the Med waterfront with

Matein KhalidThe ideologues of MAGA assured us that Tariff Man's threats were pure bombast and Wall Street believed them, the reason equities and crypto went ballistic after the election of POTUS-47. Yet Trump's tariff threats were all too real and the global markets must now pay a bitter price for history's second worst economic own goal after Brexit.The 25% tariff on Mexico will immediately send its economy into a deep recession since it sends $400 billion of exports to the

Matein KhalidIn a week where Nasdaq's fabled AI trade was slammed by the emergence of Chinese startup DeepSeek and the vision of a much lower cost efficient and less intensive energy usage performance models, it is ironic that Microsoft (MSFT) shares have traded down to 413 on its Azure stumble even though the world's preeminent software franchise will be the prime winner from lower cost AI hardware and consequent exponential rise in use cases/apps and enterprise adoption.Mr. Softy closed at

Matein KhalidThe ghost of Austrian School economist Joseph Schumpeter must be turning in his grave since his theory of creative destruction in capitalist societies just got vindicated with the vengeance by the meteoric impact of Chinese AI start up DeepSeek, whose competitive threat has triggered a trillion dollar plus bloodbath on Nasdaq as futures are down a 1,000 points, the Volatility Index is up a ghastly 40% and the world's Big Tech megacaps are slammed in unison, with Microsoft and

Matein Khalid"O liberty, what crimes are committed in your name!". So lamented a Girondist noblewoman as she gazed at the guillotine that would snuff out her life minutes later in Robespierre's reign of terror during the Great Revolution. French history then went dark. The Catholic-Royal revolt in the Vendée was crushed in literal rivers of blood. Napoleon's reign ended in the slaughter and defeat of Waterloo. Marshal Pétain's la France profonde degenerated in the grotesque nightmare of Vichy. The pieds-noirs,

Matein KhalidTwo tragic plane crashes in Azerbaijan/South Korea and now terrorist outrages in Las Vegas and New Orleans take the joy out of New Year's Day but all we can hope that the world will be reinvented with a modicum of rationality when Donald Trump swears the oath to uphold the US Constitution on January 20th. The political messiah of MAGA is also a geopolitical/trade time bomb who nominated a Gates for Attorney General and could, like Caligula, make a

Matein KhalidIt is an ironic twist of history that the world's largest Muslim country, an archipelago of 18,000 islands, whose ancient Sumatran kings once funded countless monasteries/temples at Nalanda, the Harvard/Oxford of Vedic India two millennia ago. Sumatra was then known as the kingdom of Srivijaya when Mauryan India's ruler was Ashoka, imperator of the Magadan superstate. Fast forward 22 centuries and the two best performing emerging Asian stock markets for dollar investors and moi have been India and Indonesia.

Matein KhalidJim Cramer renamed his dog Nvidia and I have renamed my periodic Mag-7/MAGA bull sessions with my fellow Nasdaq junkies as Nvidia Nights and why not? I shared my convictions that Nvidia was headed to 150 two years ago when NVDA traded at a pre-split price well below $20 a share in late 2022 when Powell's monetary tough love had slammed Nasdaq and the AI frenzy had not really begun. These posts were available to anybody for free as

Matein KhalidUS money center banks/I-banks had their best year in 2024 since the pre-Covid Stone Age. My fav turnaround names Citi and Wells Fargo exceeded my wildest expectations while the prospect of light touch regulation and M&A/IPO underwriting jackpot made Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley go ballistic. Despite the post Dec FOMC fireworks, this sector will have winners if bought at the right price even though risk abound in geopolitics, the Trump 2.0, resurgent inflation and the financing cliff in

Matein KhalidI am still puzzled by the frenzied selling in the bond market after the FOMC cut its dot-plot projections from 4 to 2 for 2025 at its Dec 18 conclave. Why? Mr. Market had already priced in two rate cuts in 2025 after he was spooked by the uptick in core PCE/CPI data. Inflation risk in Trumpnomics is exaggerated but with the President elect now wanting to seize control of the Panama Canal from Panama and Greenland from Denmark

Matein KhalidsTrump 2.0 will be all the more potent in reshaping America's economic destiny since the White House, the Senate and the House are all blood red. Tariffs/mass deportation can mean inflation shocks but deregulation, AI adoption and DOGE will have a disinflationary impact on the economy.Trump will apply punitive tariffs on a selective basis on specific countries (notably China) but his economic team is too world class to allow policies that hit US economic growth. With core PCE at

Matein KhalidI wrote a column on Vornado (VNO) as a buy at 18 in Sep'22 as it was slammed by the pandemic, its debt load and the Fed's draconian rate hikes. So VNO's price ascribed a $450 a square foot value to its prime Manhattan office/Fifth Ave retail portfolio even though its occupancy rate was 91% as the pandemic raged. To help my Dubai friends grasp that deep value discount in VNO, I wrote a post titled buying Manhattan at

Matein KhalidThe S&P 500 Index was the ultimate Thanksgiving gift to investors in US equities though the party poopah sectors like Big Pharma were the proverbial turkey. The post-election spike was only the icing on a cake that has been a dream for investors in the SPX, now up 27% with 53 record closes. America is 4% of the world's population and 25% of its GDP but almost 70% of its market cap. In pure wealth generation terms alone, the

Matein KhalidThe weekend Crony Club dinners in the finest watering holes/pizzerias of Dubai are as long as they are liquid and our sole focus is to exchange money making investment ideas and wildest new jokes. So I found out that my buddies were more interested in my calls on the Mag-7 than in my philosophical reveries on MAGA. So paisanos, viola!I had outlined my Tesla (TSLA) strategy in my pre-whisper number Lady Gaga skit. TSLA is truly caught in a

Matein Khalid The April jobs number and now the April CPI has reinforced convictions that inflation will continue to come down and thus the capital markets price two Fed rate cuts by year end. The 10-year US Treasury note yield has dropped to 4.40% though the 2-year note is still at 4.82%, making this yield curve inversion protracted even as retail sales slip and consumer credit metrics deteriorate. All is definitely not hunky-dory in the kingdom of Joe and Jane Sixpack

Matein KhalidOne thing is certain. Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden are not happy campers now that the yield on the 10-year US T-note, the single security most sensitive to expectation of shifts in Fed monetary policy, has jumped above 5%. This means that the bond market expects no FOMC rate cut tonight and for Chairman Powell to reiterate his current "higher for longer" interest rate posture. So it is no coincidence that Wall Street is on edge, men are

Matein KhalidI thought the US stock market was overextended last week after the FOMC statement endorsed Wall Street's "three rate cuts in 2H 2024 consensus". My problem was this could be derailed by one bad inflation number and that Goldilocks economy might find that its growth porridge was a tad too hot. This is exactly what happened with this week's data and thus equities were slammed last night while the yield on the 10 year US Treasury bond has risen to 4.38%.

Matein KhalidBliss it was that dawn to be alive but to be long Nvidia was pure heaven. The ghost of William Wordsworth will forgive me for butchering his verse but he could have written an immortal homage to the AI annus mirabilis of 2023 had he lived in our era.After all, the S&P 500 was up 24% in 2023 and is up 10.2% in the first three months of 2024, continuing the incredible rally that was triggered by the plunge in

Matein KhalidThe spectacular bull market that resumed in mid-October has continued into the first 9-weeks of 2024. True, Nvidia at 919, Meta at 500 and Microsoft at 415 have all been catapulted from Wall Street to Valhalla (the abode of the Nordic Gods!) but Apple is down 14% in 2024 at 172 and Tesla at 177 are not exactly looking all that hot as they did before they were cast out of the Mag-7, who accounted for two thirds of

Matein Khalid Voltaire's Dr. Pangloss's observation that we live in the best of all possible worlds definitely is true for those who held Nvidia (NVDA) into what prove to be another earnings blockbuster and now see the shares rise from 660 the night before D-Day to almost 823 at the Friday close. The problem with NVDA is that it is no longer on Wall Street but has been catapulted to Valhalla, the Nordic abode of the gods. I was gaga over

Matein KhalidNvidia's epic rise from 150 in Jan-2023 to 726 now is historic in Silicon Valley. Yet it is no exaggeration to state that the entire fate of the Mag-7, the chip sector or even Nas-100 now depends on what Jensen Huang reports and guides on Wednesday. Nvidia (NVDA) shares are just not positioned for any hint of a disappointment in revenue or EPS growth. While revenues are expected to triple to $20 billion, it would be a miracle if the exponential

Matein KhalidSaudi Arabia’s unique role in the oil market as Opec’s swing producer, the de facto central bank of oil, owes as much to its spare capacity as it does to its colossal reserves, the world’s lowest drilling cost and the sheer scale of its oil exports.However, the kingdom has also historically not hesitated to cut planned increases in spare capacity, when the Saudi government decided that its national interest lies in keeping global oil prices “higher for longer”.For instance,

Matein Khalid"Be careful what you wish for. You may just get it". This is an apt metaphor for the SEC's approval of ETF launches by Wall Street's best and brightest (biggest/meanest) fund houses from BlackRock to Fidelity, Invesco to WisdomTree.It does not surprise me that Bitcoin fell from $47,000 to $42,600 now because buy on the rumour, sell on the news is a recurrent theme on Wall Street. Coinbase and Microstrategy had been double baggers since last June as $14

Matein KhalidIn the emerging markets financial jungle, fairytales are impossible without the right jungle guide. So when Alejandro A (gringo name Alex), one of my closest friends in life since we first met in New York in J.P. Morgan Chase's capital markets training program decades ago and now the chairman of his own I-bank in Buenos Aires dissected President Milei's blueprint for revolutionary energy reform, I dutifully synthesized his ideas in a post just after last November's election. The state

Matein KhalidIf ever there was a year to make money in Big Tech, 2023 was it. My three big strategic calls all outperformed my expectations. Google rose from 85 to 142, Nvidia rose from 150 to 492 and Microsoft rose from 295 to 374. 2024 could well see several emerging markets beat the S&P 500's stellar 26% rise this year, though the real fairytale has been Argentina's YPF, up 70% since the election of a first libertarian President who quotes

Matein KhalidI agree with The Economist that India and Indonesia are the two shining stars of Asia and both are due for historic elections where the outcome is preordained, as capital markets metrics and fund flows I track discount in real time now. Prime Minister Modi will win the Indian general election with a decisive majority in the Lok Sabha. This is not just a prediction but Dalal Street's collective consensus now that Nifty is 21000. Yet I have learnt the hard

Matein KhalidBrent crude has fallen to $78 in Asia while WTI is $74 even though the Israel/Hamas war has resumed in Gaza. The bear market in oil has seen 6-weeks of relentless selling in the futures markets and even the latest OPEC+ ministerial meeting failed to convince traders that an additional 900,000 barrel of promised output cuts will offset the tsunami of supply and weak diesel, gasoline and distillate demand.The internal fissures in OPEC+ symbolized by Angola's open threat to ignore its quotas

Matein KhalidIt is no coincidence that the yield on the 10 year US Treasury note plunged 60 basis points to its current 4.34% and the US Dollar index slumped to 103.40 as successive benign October inflation data and dovish central banker comments has led to a pivot in Wall Street interest rate expectations, with the consensus now projecting two rate cuts at the March and May 2024 FOMC conclaves. This macro shift was predictably high octane fuel for the mother of all

Matein KhalidThe smoke signals from the FOMC conclave suggests that Jay Powell will not gift the Street a pacifier nor deliver an electric shock, so expect a hawkish pause with no rate hike. The trillion-dollar shrinkage in the Fed's balance sheet (QT) amplifies the liquidity squeeze since the ECB, BOE, RBA, BOC and yes, even Ueda-san's BOJ are also slimming down their bloated balance sheets. Is this a head wind for long duration risk assets like my obsessions du jour

Matein KhalidAs the gods of war exact their grotesque ransom of human blood sacrifices in the Middle East, my mind resurrects the lyrics of a Vietnam era anti war John Lennon song from my boyhood. “All we are saying is, give peace a chance”. Something has gone very badly wrong in the Arab world since the death rattle of the Ottoman Empire a hundred years ago. The post Versailles British and French imperial inheritances in Palestine, Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Syria,

Matein KhalidThe Treasury bond bloodbath is no longer about Fed policy, inflation mojo or the business cycle. It is impossible for the Powell Fed to meet its dual mandate 2% inflation target with even a 6.5% Fed funds rate as 3Q GDP was a shocking 4.9%. We are doomed to relive the stagflation nightmare of the 1970's when the Fed consistently mismanaged its inflation fight while war, revolution and two exogenous oil crises led to the end game of 20%