| Dear Mauldin Reader, On January 14, I recommended a daring play to the subscribers of my Rational Bear premium alert service: We bought put options on Union Pacific (UNP) stock, betting that the corporation running America’s biggest railroad network would go down. Just ONE WEEK LATER, on January 22, we sold our put options for a fat 152.14% return. And we managed to hit the absolute bottom, as you can see in Union Pacific’s two-year stock chart below. How did we do that? The short answer is: vigilance and elbow grease. I’ve been watching two key US industries for over a year now. I call them “the makers and the takers,” aka manufacturing and transportation. Both are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine when it comes to the health of an economy—and right now, neither of them look particularly healthy. In fact, the beleaguered transportation industry has already given Rational Bear subscribers THREE big wins. In June 2015, I started ringing the alarm bells on the struggling transportation sector. From February through May, the Dow Jones Transportation Average (DJT) dropped by 9.6%, and many of the 20 stocks that make up the index looked even worse… much worse. What’s more, first-quarter 2015 GDP had recently been revised to a negative 0.7%, and the IMF had just downgraded its forecast for US economic growth. I advised my Rational Bear subscribers to buy put options on the iShares Transportation Average ETF (IYT). Two weeks later, we cashed out for a 44% return. In November 2015, we repeated the exercise when IYT showed weakness again… this time for a 70% return within one month. The UNP win, with 152.14%, was our biggest gain to date—and I’m confident there’s much more to come. However, transportation is not the only US industrial sector that’s ailing. I recently uncovered some very worrisome numbers in the housing market, and my team and I have devised a straight-forward investment—no options or shorts—you can get into right now and profit when this new bubble bursts. All the details on this play are in the current monthly newsletter of the Rational Bear premium alert service. For the next 48 hours, you can still try it risk-free for 90 days—and at a 60% discount. Love it or your money back; it’s as simple as that. Click here to read all the details about why the lights may soon go out in the US housing market. That’s also the place to sign up, if you want to give Rational Bear a try and start receiving the newsletter and email alerts immediately. Once this offer ends—at midnight on March 11—it won’t get this inexpensive again for a while. And with the current state of the economy, I think you and your portfolio will be very happy with our bearish bets.
Sincerely,
Tony Sagami
Editor, Rational Bear
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