Delivering Alpha Delivers "Best Ideas"

With a big tip of the hat to Pragmatic Capitalist who linked to Absolute Return +Alpha, the following ideas are offered without opinion but with names for anyone interested in mimicking the conference speakers.

Taylor Woods Capital likes Brent Oil which can be captured with the US Commodities Brent Oil Fund (BNO). This is not a contango busting fund. Since the launch of US Commodities Oil Fund (USO) which tracks WTI fund providers have launched many other funds that mitigate the impact of contango but again BNO which tracks Brent does not and I am not aware of any contango busting funds that track Brent.

Ospraie Management like farmland. There are plenty of small cap farm/plantation stocks trading on foreign markets. The easiest two to trade and get information on are Cresud (CRESY) and Adecoagro (AGRO). CRESY has about cut in half over the last year. It does not help that the company is in Argentina but the trailing yield is 3.5%. AGRO has done far better over the last year but has no dividend. This is the one that George Soros has been involved with.

Queen Anne's Gate Capital Management says shorting the Euro is difficult so short the British pound and platinum and go long the US dollar. It is not clear why shorting the euro is difficult but ProShares offers 1x short exposure through EUFX and double short exposure through EUO.  I am not aware of an inverse British pound ETF but someone with a margin account could short the British Pound CurrencyShares (FXB) or buy puts on that fund. Shorting platinum can be done with the ETRACS CMCI Short Platinum Excess Return ETN (PTD).

Leon Cooperman said to avoid US Government bonds and apparently he likes the following stocks; AAIGY, COF, ESRX, GCI, HAL, KMI, MET, QCOM, WPI, WU, AAPL and KKR.

There were a few others that were kind of vague but quite a few speakers like European debt. One likes European bank debt and another likes sovereign debt from Italy and Spain.

I find these sorts of things to be interesting and that more and more of these kinds lists can be executed using ETPs is democratizing even if not any trades you'd be interested in for your portfolio. Of course anyone liking the Italian debt idea could buy the PowerShares DB Italian Treasury Bond Futures ETN (ITLY)--I am not making this one up.

Please note we do not own any of the above and are not recommending any of the above.

Finally an unrelated but humorous note. There is a new cop show on A&E on Sunday nights called Longmire that takes place in Wyoming (filmed in New Mexico). In this week's episode there was a reference to Ranchester, WY which as long time readers might recall came out on top of an unscientific Random Roger study as the best place to live and capture what one reader dubbed the tax arbitrage; live in a state with no state income tax which borders a state with no sales tax to go buy your stuff.