With hosts Aaron Task and Stephen Alpher taking the week off, this week's Alpha Trader features Seeking Alpha Marketplace head Daniel Shvartsman chatting with Michael Gayed of the Lead-Lag Report. The question at hand, asks Gayed: Is the Fed going to win in its fight against the massive deflationary forces facing the economy? Gayed thinks not. Instead, he believes we're in a perpetual period of lower rates, disinflation, and market volatility. It's time for investors to get "tactical," he says. ...
Apr 21, 2020•28 min
This week's Alpha Trader podcast with hosts Aaron Task and Stephen Alpher features a return appearance by Wall Street technician and current Realmoney.com columnist Helene Meisler. Following that, it's Seeking Alpha's Daniel Shvartsmann talking tech with Chaim Siegel of Elazar Advisors and Nail Tech Earnings. That we might have hit a "V-shaped" bottom a couple of weeks back is generating plenty of chatter, but Meisler has spent her time studying a few other bear markets. What she found is that b...
Apr 14, 2020•43 min
This week's Alpha Trader podcast features a return appearance by J.C. Parets of All Star Charts. Following Parets is a special report on Simon Property Group (SPG), with Seeking Alpha's Daniel Shvartsman talking with Julian Lin of the Best of Breed Marketplace service. Parets tells hosts Aaron Task and Stephen Alpher that the recent action in stocks is looking like a classic bear market bounce. Why? To name a few reasons: The list of stocks, sectors, and global indices making 52-week lows contin...
Apr 07, 2020•34 min
This week's Alpha Trader features hosts Aaron Task and Stephen Alpher talking with Jim Bianco of Bianco Research about the "nationalization" of large swaths of the financial markets. Prior to the chat with Bianco, Task and Alpher mull the major bounce in stocks over the past few sessions. They note that the bear markets of 2000-2002 and 2007-2009 had any number of "face-ripping" rallies, only to reverse and make new lows shortly after. The easy call for now is that this too is another face-rippe...
Mar 31, 2020•40 min
This week's Alpha Trader podcast features hosts Aaron Task and Stephen Alpher talking with Jeff Macke about retail amid the pandemic panic. Prior to the chat with Macke, Task and Alpher mull the speed with which markets have plunged through any number of bazookas fired by the Fed (Editor's note: Roughly 48 hours after the recording of this podcast, the Fed announced an even larger bazooka - unlimited QE, the purchase of corporate paper, and a dusting off of the financial crisis' TALF facility - ...
Mar 24, 2020•37 min
This week's Alpha Trader podcast features hosts Aaron Task and Stephen Alpher talking about the market panic from COVID-19, and chatting with The Schork Report's Stephen Schork about the crash in crude oil. Editor's note: This podcast was recorded late last week - prior to the market's 10% gain on Friday, 12% loss on Monday, and 100 basis point Fed rate cut in-between. The speed of the market decline has shaken everybody up, but Task and Alpher figure there are a couple of things we can count on...
Mar 17, 2020•33 min
This week's Alpha Trader podcast features hosts Aaron Task and Stephen Alpher talking about the market fallout from the coronavirus with LPL Financial's Ryan Detrick and the economic fallout with RSM's Joe Brusuelas. Editor's note: This podcast was recorded on Friday March 6th - prior to the weekend collapse in the oil price adding to the coronavirus panic. Detrick has been prepping clients for a pullback for some time, and he notes the correction at the time of recording (just over 12%) was rou...
Mar 10, 2020•36 min
This week's Alpha Trader podcast features Westwood Capital Managing Partner Dan Alpert, who has a bit of a variant perception of last week's coronavirus-related market panic. The selloff, Alpert suggests, has more to do with where markets stood prior to the coronavirus making such loud headlines. He reminds that the SARS and Ebola scares didn't affect risk assets all that much. Markets prior to last week were too perky and ready for a correction - the coronavirus provided the excuse to sell. Als...
Mar 03, 2020•30 min
This week's Alpha Trader podcast features hosts Aaron Task and Stephen Alpher talking tech - particularly "new paradigm" tech - with Mark Hibben of Rethink Technology. Before that, the hosts chat about the rapidly developing coronavirus situation. What's sure to be a very sizable economic slowdown - in China, of course, but clearly also spreading elsewhere - can no longer be denied. That's bringing Fed rate cuts in 2020 back into play, and while Fed speakers are playing it cool for now, it seems...
Feb 25, 2020•36 min
This week's Alpha Trader podcast features hosts Aaron Task and Stephen Alpher chatting with Kevin Simpson of Capital Wealth Planning. For a few months now, Task and Alpher have held that the Fed successfully engineered a soft landing in 2019, leading to a healthy bull market, a la 1995. The action of late though has them questioning whether we're now closer to a bubbly late-1999 scenario. They remind that Cody Willard was on the podcast just weeks ago making the bull case for names like Tesla (T...
Feb 18, 2020•32 min
This week's Alpha Trader podcast features hosts Aaron Task and Stephen Alpher talking with veteran Wall Street technician and current Realmoney.com columnist Helene Meisler. Was that it? The great correction of early 2020 was a relatively brief and shallow one. Just days after a bit of fear entered the markets, the major U.S. averages are marking (or close to) new all-time highs. Meisler expects another modest move down is necessary to wring out a few more of the excesses that were evident a few...
Feb 11, 2020•33 min
This week's Alpha Trader podcast features Wolfe Research Managing Director John Roque, and Jerome Levy Forecasting Center Director of Research Sri Thiruvadanthai. Roque's technical indicators prior to last week were clearly pointing to a coming correction, and the coronavirus scare was the excuse needed for markets to begin heading down. Folks are already wondering when to buy the dip, but Roque notes the move lower has been very modest both in terms of points and time. With the S&P 500 (SPY...
Feb 04, 2020•37 min
The one-way stock market has gotten its excuse to reverse course a bit with the coronavirus panic. Even with the skittishness, hosts Aaron Task and Stephen Alpher note it's only been the most modest of pullbacks so far. Even if inclined to buy-the-dip (and the hosts lean that way), there's no need to rush to do so. The question at hand: Is the market in a 1999 topping-out scenario or a mid-90s correction within a major bull market? Paul Tudor Jones, Seth Klarman, and even corporate gadfly turned...
Jan 28, 2020•26 min
Hedge fund manager and editor of Trading With Cody, Cody Willard joins Alpha Trader hosts Aaron Task and Stephen Alpher for this week's podcast. The episode begins with a discussion of Tesla (TSLA), and Willard - who was a longtime bear on the company (but never short) - began buying close to last year's lows alongside the introduction of the Model 3. Making him even more bullish was the unveiling of the cybertruck. Willard believes every car on the planet over the next five-to-ten years is goin...
Jan 21, 2020•27 min
Canaccord Genuity Chief Market Strategist Tony Dwyer joins Alpha Trader hosts Aaron Task and Stephen Alpher to kick off the podcast's 2020 season. Dwyer was among the more bullish strategists last year - and he remains constructive on stocks - but the market's big rise leaves the S&P 500 (SPY) only about 5% below his 2020 target. At the root of Dwyer's bullishness last year was the Fed's about-face, with a switch to rate cuts throughout 2019 vs. the previous years' rate hike cycle. Currently...
Jan 14, 2020•30 min
We're sharing an episode from our Value Investor's Edge Live podcast, hosted on our The Investing Edge channel, in place of our normal Alpha Trader show (which will return next week). This episode features our host, J Mintzmyer of Value Investor’s Edge, speaking with Oystein Kallekev, CEO of Flex LNG, about the overall LNG shipping markets, US-China potential, and IMO 2020 impacts. Shipping has been one of the most buzzed about sectors in the market in recent months, and J is one of the leading ...
Jan 07, 2020•43 min
Alpha Trader concludes its first season with an interview of Michael Gayed, a prolific and well-followed Seeking Alpha contributor, and also the editor of The Lead-Lag Report. Inflation expectations have bottomed out, argues Gayed, and if reflation is the theme going forward, that means good things for some lagging equity sectors - notably financials (XLF), emerging markets ([[EEM]], [[VWO]]), and commodities like energy (XLE). On the flip side, reflation would mean just the opposite not just fo...
Dec 31, 2019•21 min
Alpha Trader's 11th episode features hosts Aaron Task and Stephen Alpher riffing on the year just passed, and mulling what might be to come in 2020. Before getting into 2019, Task reminds just how poor 2018 was - with negative returns across pretty much every asset class of note. That red ink came alongside what turned out to be the end of a multi-year Fed tightening cycle. 2019 brought with it Fed easing, and the market responded by moving sharply higher. The "soft landing" having been achieved...
Dec 24, 2019•22 min
Alpha Trader's 10th episode features longtime options trader Jon Najarian. Well-known for his CNBC appearances, Jon (along with his brother) is currently hanging his shingle at Market Rebellion. Don't even try to profit by reacting to the headlines, says Najarian. The machines are way ahead of even the most sophisticated traders. Instead, he says, have a plan in place for what names/sectors are going to be able to sustain a move after the headline has worn off. Getting to specifics, Najarian has...
Dec 17, 2019•30 min
Alpha Trader's ninth episode features Behavioral Macro blog author and former hedge fund manager Mark Dow. Dare we say, "goldilocks?" The economy continues to move forward without inflation moving higher, says Dow. As for asset prices, lingering fear of the financial crisis is keeping animal spirits somewhat in check. Add it up, and Dow sees the Fed happy to stay on hold well into the next year even as short-term rate markets are (kind of) pricing in another rate cut in 2020. Dow puts to bed the...
Dec 10, 2019•30 min
The eight episode of Alpha Trader features longtime energy trader Bob Iaccino of Path Trading Partners. Asked to handicap this week's OPEC meeting, Iaccino doesn't expect additional production cuts (nor does he see the cooperation for cuts in the future). One reason is OPEC's dwindling influence over the global crude market. He notes the previous cut had little effect, and OPEC likely realizes it would take a drastic reduction to really move prices higher. Another reason is the Saudi Aramco IPO ...
Dec 03, 2019•28 min
The seventh episode of Alpha Trader features Jim O'Shaughnessy, who helms O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, and is the author of several book on the market, including the seminal What Works on Wall Street. "Arbitraging human nature is the last sustainable edge," says O'Shaughnessy when asked if "what worked" when that book was published (1997) still works today. In other words, yes, systematic and rules-based strategies still have a place for investors looking for alpha. Passive investors, suggest...
Nov 26, 2019•29 min
The sixth episode of Alpha Trader features not one, but two guests, with hosts Aaron Task and Stephen Alpher speaking to longtime gold trader Scott Bauer and stock market strategist Ryan Detrick. First up is Detrick, who talks about the record-breaking length of this economic cycle - currently 124 months and counting. While this may suggest the bull run is getting long in the tooth, Detrick notes nominal GDP has grown just 50% over the 10 years, or roughly inline with post-war economic up-cycles...
Nov 19, 2019•30 min
The fifth episode of Alpha Trader features hosts Aaron Task and Stephen Alpher talking to the WSJ's Greg Zuckerman, author of The Man Who Solved The Market: How Jim Simons Launched The Quant Revolution. Already a highly accomplished mathematician and successful commodities trader, Jim Simons in his mid-40s wanted more, and took his particular set of skills to the far deeper world of stocks. Equities trading then (the mid-80s) was dominated by fundamental analysis, but Simons didn't know the firs...
Nov 12, 2019•29 min
The fourth episode of Alpha Trader features hosts Aaron Task and Stephen Alpher talking to Jim Grant, the founder and editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer. The business of modern-day central banking, says Grant, is the business of manipulating the most sensitive price in capitalism - the rate of interest. If Jay Powell can't seem to get anything right, it's because the very nature of his job assures he'll be wrong. At least, notes Grant, Powell hasn't taken the U.S. down the path of negative...
Nov 05, 2019•34 min
The third episode of Alpha Trader features hosts Aaron Task and Stephen Alpher talking CME Group Chief Economist Blu Putnam, with topics moving from the Fed, to Brexit, and then back to these shores and the U.S. economy. The Fed is surely cutting rates this week, says Putnam, but the FOMC is quite divided - some are arguing that rate cuts aren't needed, and others are pushing for an even faster pace of monetary ease. He's going to be very interested in how Fed Chair Jay Powell navigates these di...
Oct 29, 2019•23 min
The latest episode for Alpha Trader features hosts Aaron Task and Stephen Alpher talking with J.C. Parets of All Star Charts. J.C. is pure technician - caring not a whit about any of the news, but instead purely focused on what the charts are saying. And what is he hearing? Stocks for the last couple of years have essentially been in a consolidation following an historically strong bull market. This sort of pattern typically resolves in a continuation of the previous trend - meaning a fresh bull...
Oct 22, 2019•41 min
Eddy Elfenbein runs the must-read Crossing Wall Street blog and is portfolio manager for the AdvisorShares Focused Equity ETF (CWS). Elfenbein is notable for creating a Buy List of 25 stocks to get into at the start of the year, and then sticking with those names for the next 52 weeks. Also notable: Said list has topped the return of the S&P 500 for 13 straight years, and is set to do so again in 2019. In this initial episode for Alpha Trader, hosts Aaron Task and Stephen Alpher talk markets...
Oct 15, 2019•34 min
Welcome to the trailer episode of Alpha Trader - Seeking Alpha’s latest podcast which dives into the most important market news and provides insights on upcoming market events. In this trailer, hosts Aaron Task and Stephen Alpher introduce themselves by chatting about a couple of the best and worst trades of their career. The first full episode is scheduled for release on October 15. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Oct 08, 2019•7 min
Alpha Trader is a weekly investor-focused podcast produced by Seeking Alpha that will dive into the most impactful market news and set the stage for upcoming market events. Hosted by Aaron Task and Stephen Alpher, episodes will be available every Tuesday, and will include discussions with market experts on topics relevant to active traders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sep 27, 2019•46 sec
