TRADE ALERT

I’m going to start slowly but surely scaling into a few McDonald’s $MCD puts. I’m using puts instead of common stock because the premiums on the puts are negligible and by using put options, I am limiting any losses to the small amount of capital I’m using to buy these options. I’m buying a small starter position in some MCD put options dated out into September 2015 with expirations around $95 or so.

I’ll do more formal analysis on $MCD tomorrow, so stay tuned for that, but click on the link below for some recent analysis behind my$MCD move here today:

I am saying that there’s a trend of people stopping their $MCD and $WEN and packaged-food eating habits and learning to enjoy food that’s less processed and closer to its natural form and sourced from a closer proximity than chicken-fragments-from-who-knows-where deep fried, frozen and refried for a crowd of people standing in a line in a plastic restaurant.

And if you’re going to just short common stock in $MCD make sure you stay on top of it and stop yourself out if it gets too painful, maybe cover it if the stock gets above $105 or so.

Good Luck.

A few other notes for you:

THE TRILLION DOLLAR SOCIAL CAPITAL INDUSTRY

Read my latest in the USAToday from this past weekend: http://goo.gl/MIYJBG

Social networking stocks are still some of the fastest growing stocks on the planet these days. What other sector of the economy is growing 50-100% per year? Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn each showed year over year growth in that range as they figure out how to monetize their user bases while continuing to grow their user bases. Attention in years ahead will be much more on whether these companies can figure out how to get a few extra pennies of revenue out of each user per day through advertising and other means as they build their users’ and their own #SocialCapital.

But the real story of #SocialCapital is the value it’s creating for the billions of people on the planet who now use it daily. That’s why I say that #SocialCapital is going to create trillions of dollars of value for individuals and businesses over the next decade and onward. People get jobs from the connections they’ve made on social networks. People create public reputations and some even get elected to office based on the following they’ve built. People make millions publishing their content and promoting their products on social networks. People recover lost friends, family, and even stolen items — like the tractor trailer my cousin recently recovered from a chop shop after posting pictures of it on Facebook.

Very little of that kind of individual #SocialCapital can be quantified. Getting all the experience you can get, building all the Social Capital you can build along the way, is what will get you your next great job, open up the next opportunity or make you your next important connection. I ended up with my own TV show on Fox Business as a direct result of all the writing, emailing, and social networking I did in my first decade of my career. Being smart and ethical, working hard, paying your dues, learning all you can, taking advantage of opportunities, creating those opportunities — it all happens in a public forum of social networking these days, which helps explain this recent quote from an article about #SocialCapital I found on business social network LinkedIn after seeing it posted on my own financial social network, Scutify.

“In this new Social Era of transparency, connectedness, and stakeholder empowerment, social media exchanges are acting as catalysts to accelerate the formation of of Social Capital between and amongst its stakeholders (i.e. employees, customers, business partners).”

With apps, smartphones and tablets making it ever easier to engage with people on social networks, the value proposition and creation mechanisms for #SocialCapital are growing exponentially. Looking out over the next five to 10 years, you have to know that the same kids (and adults) today who take selfies with their smartphones to post on SnapChat and Facebook are going to be doing ten times more of that and most of it in real-time using wearables, creating #SocialCapital all along the way. Investors will be using wearable apps from Scutify and others that tell you what company makes whatever product you happen to be looking at, along what the stock chart and fundamentals look like for that company and then engage with the community to learn even more and share their knowledge.

Social networking and apps get a bum rap for reducing the amount of time that people look at each other, talk face to face, and so on. And there’s certainly some truth to that. But part of the reason the old folks complain about losing conversational and interpersonal skills is because those very skills have created #SocialCapital for generations of society. What they don’t recognize is that you are creating value for yourself, your career and your reputation when you tap and scroll through LinkedIn, Scutify and even SnapChat.

Are you maximizing your own #SocialCapital every time you get online? If not, then you’re not doing it right.

Read my latest in the USAToday from this past weekend: http://goo.gl/MIYJBG

VIRTUAL REALITY WILL MAKE FB AND AAPL COMPETITORS

For all the hype about $FB‘s Oculus Rift virtual reality, you do realize that if VR takes off, in a few years Apple will roll out their version of VR and if they make it the iPod/iPhone/iPad of the industry (ie, easier, better than any competing products in the industry), Apple will rule VR too. That said, when do the Android-based VR headsets gonna start hitting the market? 2 years IMHO. “Get ready because it’s all about virtual reality”http://t.co/l3LxocnE9M

RATES, BUYBACKS, BUBBLES

Artificially low rates from the FED has created an environment where “S&P 500 companies have bought $2.1 trillion worth of themselves since the financial crisis http://t.co/fKVyHyycCp” and that is two trillion bucks of what we mean when we say “misallocation” and why I have long called ZIRP and QE one of the greatest forms of corporate welfare and therefore one of the largest transfers of wealth (upward!) in the history of the planet.

RUSSIA BLACK SWAN POTENTIAL

Russia, its currency and its economy remain potential Black Swans to worry about for every investor: “Russia’s anti-U.S. sentiment now is even worse than it was in Soviet Union”http://t.co/DQ22WXTcS9