This page has been archived and commenting is disabled.

Hedge Fund Manager Yra Harris Says We’re Entering a World of Hurt

Submitted by madhedgefundtrader on 02/01/2010 10:21 -0400

Long time futures trading veteran, Yra Harris, thinks we are in a mini bubble now, which is not built on excessive leverage, and therefore won’t go as high as previous ones.

The carry trade is now pouring into large cap equities with decent dividends and healthy balance sheets, like Verizon Communications (VZ) and AT&T (T). Why should banks bother lending to borrowers of dubious credit when they can simply pick up a clean 400 basis points in the Treasury market?

He foresees chop inside a range for the indefinite future for many markets, frustrating the hell out of traders. Yra likes going long gold and silver against the euro and the British pound, as investors continue to seek a deflation hedge. He also likes the grains long term, as Obama is continuing the disastrous policies of the Bush administration, such as promoting ethanol as an alternative fuel, while baring imports from more efficient Brazil.

Yra is a global macro hedge fund manager who has been a fixture of the futures community for over three decades. He cut his teeth in the foreign currency markets during the violent days of the seventies, just as that industry was entering a period of explosive growth. It gave him a front row seat to the collapse of the dollar, which has been a slow motion train wreck ever since. His career took him though Solaris Capital, Praxis Trading, and James Sinclair & Co., among others, and has served on several committees at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

He is ultra cautious on copper, which has become overextended and is overly dependent on the China trade. The Fed should raise interest rates by 2% tomorrow, as the artificially low 0.25% rate now is creating dangerous imbalances in the financial system.

Yra writes a free daily blog on global macro investing called Notes From Underground, which offers pithy insights on every major market in the world, and includes copious long and short recommendations. You can find it at http://yrah53.wordpress.com/ and sign up for a free feed.

To listen to my complete interview with Yra please go to my Hedge Fund Radio website by clicking here at http://www.madhedgefundtrader.biz/Yra_Harris.html