IMF warns food prices might cause starvation

The IMF warned that food price inflation would cause starvation if trend continues From the article:

"Thousands, hundreds of thousands of people will be starving. Children will be suffering from
malnutrition, with consequences for all their lives," he told reporters.
He said the problem could lead to trade imbalances that may eventually affect developed nations, "so it is not only a humanitarian question".

With the falling dollar, and with the increasing usage of corn going to the production of (inefficient) Ethanol, I do not see this problem going away anytime soon. It will be extremely sad if we do face global starvation. Recent riots in Haiti and the Philippines demonstrates how serious this problem is becoming. How can we solve this problem? Relinquish our Ethanol plans which will free up 30% of the corn produced in the USA for food (an not expensive alternative fuel)
As traders and investors, it makes very much sense to place our long bets with the soft commodities.

Week in review

It hard lesson I learned this week: Don't chase performance. I was too hopped up being bullish this week that I over looked many key criteria when buying a stock. As of right now, I am heavy weighted in Energy and Chinese stocks. Even though it doesn't feel like a bottom with these Chinese stocks, I do think 5-10 or even 20 years from now, these investments (LFC, CHL) will reap huge rewards. I also took a position in DBA (Power Shares Agiculture) and Natural Gas (UNG) along with Brazilian miners RIO (CVRD) . I continue to think commodities (more so AG the metals) will continue to outperform. I also added Petrobras (largest in my portfolio) this week, I share the same opinion of the legend Ken Heebner that Petrobras could potentially produce oil on a middle eastern scale. In short, I am focusing on the long term now. I do think 23-36 months from now, these investments will reap rewards.

I will be cost averaging and building a bigger position in the Tawian ETF ETW. Taiwan will reap massive fiscal benefits as tensions between China and Taiwan improves. We are already seeing changes taking place. Last week, the Chinese government was said to have removed the missiles that were pointing to Taiwan. I believe Taiwan is a place to really keep an eye on this year.

Shifted Positions

One of my rules is never let a positions go below 10%. This is to reduce the potental loss of a position I might have. ACH and FMCN has fallen below 10% of my buying price so I had to bite the bullet and hit the SELL button.

I shifted that money into buying more PBR and UNG

Current holdings in the order of most weighted

PBR
CHL
UNG
RIO
RJA
LFC
MELI
VIP
EWT

Stepped in to buy more "stuff"

New Positions:

Long 100 shares of PBR
Long 100 shares of ACH
Long 100 shares of VIP
Long 100 shares of RIO

"We Can't Go Down" attitude

Today's horrible job numbers would have led me to believe we were going to plunge triple digits on the dow. But I am not surprised that the market is up ~30 points from yesterday's close. The market just doesn't want to go down. Buyers are stepping in on any weakness and they are not selling on strength. I am back on the long side for now and will be aggressively buying emerging markets..

Transactions today :

Open 100 shares of MELI
Open 100 shares of FMCN
Open 100 shares of LFC
Open 100 shares of CHL

Looking to buy:
ISRG, AAPL

Is the bottom in?

Like they say, when you pick bottoms you get SH*T but is the bottom in? Short term, I believe the BULLS are going to take charge. A lot of talking heads that were extremely bearish are turning bullish. And cramer says we should becareful which means we really consider start buying :)

Even though we are again in extremely overbought conditions, the dow did flash a double bottom...

Whats looking more interesting are the emerging markets, in particular CHINA. It seems like the correction in asia is finally over as the downtrend has been broken

Tomorrow, I will start to buy Chinese stocks again. In particular FMCN, BIDU, CHL.

The Bulls come out to party

I haven't been posting much, thats because I havent been doing much :.

I took some off the table with MSFT two days ago (douh!). It was a bit too early considering the rally. My motivation behind that is 1) our 401K is opening up 2) one should never invest their 401K savings into their employers 3) MSFT has done jack.

People seem to have forgotten or looked away from today's financials doom and gloom news (UBS, Deutsche Bank have to write down additional losses in subslime). Money is being rotated out of commodities and into the beaten up sectors like financials, and tech.

If we get another big rally with impressive volume like we had today, I will be forced to take put the chips back on the table.

Eyeing: BIDU,FMCN, LFC, CHL
Holding: PAL, EWT, RJA