2015, The Year That Was

STOCKS. The best three stocks are AVXL @ 596%, EGRX @ 524% and LINDW @ 464%.

This is a stock trading on Other OTC and is a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company headquartered in New York, engaging in the development of drug candidates for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, other central nervous system diseases, pain, and various cancers. The stock belongs to the Healthcare sector, the Biotechnology industry.

The company’s stock price went up because the industry is a closely watched one.

Also, management filed SEC form 8-K, Change in Directors or Principal Officers in June, it filed SEC form 10-Q, Quarterly Report with good numbers, the investors exhibited increased interest in small-cap stocks in October and because the management prepared for up-listing to NASDAQ, announcing a reverse stock split also in October.

Prices dropped in November and again in December because some irregularities have been discovered.

The long-term price pattern which interests me is the great advance (from US$0.80 to $14.33, a 1,691% increase in just ten months) followed by decline (from $14.33 to $5.57) which still kept the stock at #1 spot for the year. This pattern is totally different from a security which keeps climbing up to #1, sometimes a lot, sometimes a little, without major price decline(s),

Three stocks with the biggest 1-year decline are HELI @ –93%, AAMC @ –94% and EOX @ –95%.

The stock market monthly performance list is as follows:

January 78%

February 81%

March 75%

April 78%

May 60%

June 33%

July 87%

August 136%

September 53%

October 90%

November 45%

December 62%

Total 878%

SECTORS. 31 industry sectors out of 182 are in green territory.

The top three winners in 2015 are Business Information, Computer – Software and Building Products Retail – Wholesale.

The three bottom sectors are Textile – Apparel, Oil – Production & Pipeline and Finance – Investment Management.

MUTUAL FUNDS. Top performers this year are two of the Profunds Ultralatin America @ 278%, two of the Profunds Precious Metals Ultra Sector @ 154% and two of the Profunds Ultrashort Latin America Funds @ 87%.

EXCHANGE TRADED FUNDS. The best three ETFs this year are DB US Dollar Index Bullish Powershares @ 7.37%, Direxion Daily Csi 300 China A 1X @ 7.23% and Proshares Ultrapro Short Nasdaq @ 2.29%.

FUTURES. The top contracts in 2015 are: (Currencies) Japanese Yen @ –1.32%, (Energies) Ethanol @ –7.87%, (Financials) Ultra T-bond @ 3.03%, (Grains) Canola @ 12.75%, (Indices) E-mini Nasdaq 100 @ 7.74%, (Meats) Live Cattle @ –11.05%, (Metals) Gold @ –11.98% and (Softs) Cocoa @ 11.49%.

INDEXES. The best three indexes this year were CBOE Volatility Index @ 11.38%, US Dollar Index @ 9.65% and S&P Consumer Discretionary @ 8.04%.

DOW Jones Industrial Average finished down @ –3.10% this year while S&P500 lost –1.75%.

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Comparing the figures above to those of last year, the 2015 total monthly cumulative return is lower.

The number of sectors in green territory increased from 20 in 2014 to 31 in 2015.

The prim-donna of the news in 2015 was oil: not a single day passed without headlines about oil prices, oil conferences, decisions, supply/demand, OPEC, small and big players, fracking, companies closing down, etc.

The reality is we are witnessing the depletion of a natural resource which Earth offered abundantly to us so far.

Who says we must use natural resources or use them to their complete exhaustion?

What else comes after the oil era ends?

Perhaps we must shift our focus from the Earth’s natural resources for which we had found multiple uses to our personal natural talents where our discoveries and mining techniques are lagging behind. Earth’s elements have not been made for Man to use, abuse and deplete them freely, and Man must wake up to new truths such as not to depend on Earth’s minerals anymore, minerals which he affectionately and conveniently calls “resources”.

Oil was never important for millions of eons and Man has made do without it for hundreds of thousands of years before the industrial revolution brought it to the forefront of consumption into high demand. Crude oil driller and refiner Exxon is the world’s largest company proving that oil has overpowered us in all aspects of our life, not only in car gas usage.

You have to ask how it is possible to replace a depleted resource (commodity) which has been consumed at a much, much faster rate than it was forming with one which forms faster naturally than it can be consumed.

What solution is better than oil? Are the modern age engineers sure they will not repeat the mistake of discovering, using and exhausting another one of the Earth’s natural resources? Are we developing and cultivating more and more dependencies just because we are unable to carve our way to total freedom?

Should we call ourselves the Earth’s true natural resource?

I do not know the answers, but many thoughts pass through my mind watching commodity prices dancing on my monitor screens wondering where all this is going and whether our destructive dependence on something which Earth produced blindly could indeed be called “progress”.

Progress to where?