I have become fascinated by Acai, even though I can still not pronounce it correctly and I won't even bother trying to figure out how to print it with the accent which I can't find on my computer keyboard. I'm an admitted latecomer to the trend. Yes, it's old news. But it's still a good story. The recent New Yorker article did a great job outlining the background.

The New Yorker article tells the tale of how two SoCal chums and University of Colorado grads (Go Buffs!) Ryan and Jeremy Black "discovered" acai in the Braizilian jungle and started marketing it in the United States, kicking off what would become one of the most potent health-food marketing booms in recent history, aided and abetted by none other than Oprah.

What I found interesting about the article is not so much about the controversy surrounding the health benefits of acai (like most debates, the truth lies probably somewhere in between), but the entrepreneurial spirit of the two Black brothers and their partner Edmund Nichols. The went to the jungle with a load of credit-card debt, locked in a long-term contract to sell acai through a Brazilian producer, and spent hundreds of thousands in the first year to ship Acai to the United States. Within two years they were doing half a million in sales and now they do $50 million. Quite an adventure.

The other story in acai is about marketing. How does an obscure jungle fruit go from being a locally enjoyed delicacy to a multi-billion-dollar global business in ten years? Savvy marketing. The blacks hooked into real-world health research and captured the Brazilian mystique. The more nefarious marketeers later leveraged Acai into online marketing scams. But both the legitimate companies and online scammers had something in common: They knew that consumers like a good story, and you can't get much better of a story than a mysterious berry coming out of the Brazilian jungle.

Here is an abstract of the article from the New Yorker (full article available only in print):

Another Fed day, another episode of serial money printing, another banner day and a new high for gold.

It really feels like gold has entered the final and most exciting stage of the bull market. As Jim Sinclair, long-term gold trader, Chairman of Tanzanian Royalty Exploration, and Publisher of JSMineset.com says, gold is ready to go ballistic.

It's another breakout in a series of powerful breakouts. We've been alerting you to these breakouts ever since this site was launched. Remember this one? Or what about this one?  And this one.

It seems to happen at least twice a year now, gold consolidates for about six months and then breaks out into a powerful $200 move. But silver is now the star, having doubled in less than a year!

Here's some good reading on the topic:

• Investor Uprising has a great technical look at gold by Fred Goodman.
• My new site, Investor Uprising, has published an new exhaustive, 28-page report on gold, written by yours truly.
• Jim Sinclair says we're headed for $1650 next on the way to $2000.

Investment comrades, I have helped launched a new site sponsored by PRNewswire called investor Uprising. There, you will find everything you love to follow, including business trends, rising companies, stock picks, and model portfolios.

The Guide to Investment Metrics tells you how to screen for more reasonably valued companies. Investor Uprising expands on the investment philosophy developed in these pages: looking for reasonably valued, growing companies and invest slowly over time, ignoring volatile market swings and focusing on dollar-cost averaging. It works in bull markets, and it helps you survive in bear markets. By focusing on stocks with low valuations, you can reduce your risk.

Go to the site now and register  -- if you are among the first 1,000 registrants you will be entered into a drawing for a free iPad!

Check it out here.

Next week I am launching a new Website for PRNewswire called Investor Uprising. It is going to focus on high-quality investment opportunities and business trends. We'll also pick and watch lots of stocks on a GARP (Growth at a Reasonable Price) basis.

For the first project, we are creating a list of 30 companies which we will use to build an Index. This comes from a methodology I have used for 10 years to screen stocks and build "monkey" portfolios that can be bought and passively left alone. Using this method, the portfolios have averaged a 30% (cumulative) return since 2006 and none of them has ever lost money.

Next week you will find these stock picks on Investor Uprising (which has not yet launched), but today I'm going to give you four of them. Here are some low-PEG stocks we will be following at Investor Uprising.

Dolby Laboratories (DLB)

 12-month sales growth: 28%

12-month income growth: 17%

Forward P/E: 15

Return on Equity: 20%

PEG Ratio: 1

Summary: Dolby is dominating the business for digital music tools. Specifically, it licenses many of the leading digital sound and signal processing systems for digital film, DVS, Blu-ray, and digital 3D systems. It has been steadily growing for years.

Veeco Instruments Inc. (VECO)

 12-month sales growth: 150%

12-month income growth: 1,000%

Forward P/E: 13

Return on Equity: 46%

PEG Ratio: .72

Qualitative: Veeco is a leading manufacturer of important manufacturing and testing equipment in the LED, solar, and seminconductor market. It also makes equipment for the manufacturing of disk drives. If Veeco's growth rates seem absnormally hight, its because it swung from losses to a profit in 2010, yielding what looks like spectacular earnings growth. It has also growth its revenue through merger.

Gilead Sciences Inc. (GILD)

 12-month sales growth: 0%

12-month income growth: -20%

Forward P/E: 9

Return on Equity: 45%

PEG Ratio: .70

Qualitative: Gilead is an extremely well-managed biotech company with a long track record of high ROE. Recently, it's revenues have been flat and earnings have shrunk due to maturity of some key drug markets. However, it is still enormously profitable, booking $2.9B in profits in 2010, and its valuation is just plain cheap.

Medifast Inc. (MED)

12-month sales growth: 57%

12-month income growth: 147%

Forward P/E: 10

Return on Equity: 33%

PEG Ratio: .50

Qualitative: Medifast is a fast-growing producer of diet supplements and nutrition products. The Medifast brands include many varieties of diet and weight-loss shakes, vitamins, food bars, and other food products.

Stay tuned for the launch of the new site! We are looking for moderators and bloggers. If you are interested, ping me at scott.raynovich@investoruprising.com.

I'll try to spare you political rhetoric and speak in simple terms: The U.S. Federal budget is out of control. The deficit remains over a trillion dollars, interest costs are increasing, and if something extreme isn't done very soon it will enter a death spiral.

President Obama has put out a budget showing $3.8 trillion dollars in spending in 2011. The projected federal revenues are $2.1 trillion, creating a $1.7 trillion deficit. Huh? This is somebody who said he was heading back toward fiscal conservatism.

That's insane. Not only will the deficit run over a trillion dollars for the third consecutive year, but the total federal budget only four years ago was $2.5 trillion. Folks, the budget has increased 37% in four years!

What if you own budget did that? What if all of the sudden you were spending 30% more than you brought in? What if you were running a company whose revenues were $2.1 trillion but whose expenses were $3.8 trillion? You would try to bring it into balance, no?

Both parties are hiding their heads in the sand. We all know that the bulk of the money is spent on the entitlement programs and defense. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans want to touch entitlements -- and the Republicans won't touch defense. So we're stuck.

No, they're sticking to rhetoric about ticky-tack discretionary programs that cost few billion there and a few billion here. It doesn't make a bit of difference. We're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts being needed.

And would it really be "Draconian" to go back, say, to a $2.6  trillion level of spending, which is what we were spending in 2007? Was the government really that much different then? Is it 37% better now?  I don't undersand how this can happen.

Radical change is needed now. Social Security and Medicaire reform is imperative. If you don't think so, just look at the chart below, produced by the independent CBO, and tell me the current Congress is on track to fix things.

Look at the chart above and tell me where the "draconian" cuts are. The budget is skyrocketing. The deficits are skyrocking. There are no draconian cuts.

The current path ain't going to do it. it's just common sense. Another year or two of deficits like this with rising interest rates, and the costs of servicing the debt feed on themselves. Let's get out of denial. Let's fix it.  

2010 was a great year in the markets, and a decent year for the Rayno Portfolio, but let's not get too excited. It's like being happy about getting a new Toyota after your buddy totaled your Porsche. That's how I view the 2009/2010 market in the context of the 2008 financial debacle. Yes, I like the Toyota, but can I get the Porsche back too?
 
The Rayno Model Portfolio delivered a solid 9% gain -- 10.4% total if you include dividends. This is a slight underperformance in the S&P gains. But please keep in mind that we advised readers to go to 100% CASH (or better yet gold) at the beginning of 2008 -- and so our 2008 Model Portfolio lost no money in one of the worst financial crises in history. A 10.4% gain looks a lot better when you managed to avoid the 35% decline two years earlier.

The Rayno Model Portfolio still has a track record of having NEVER LOST MONEY, and the cumulative returns since 2005 are now in excess of 40% total since 2005. Again, a lot of this goes back to the decision of going to 100% cash in 2008.

Sometimes the best way to make money is to avoid losing it.

The results of the model portfolio are below. To summarize, there were some volatile results in our picks. Our best pick was silver, via the Silver ETF (SLV), which was up 70%. As you know we have been fans of the precious metals for many years, and we believe they are in strong, secular bull markets that will continue. I'm still a huge silver bull.

Obviously, this strange beast called "QE2" is in the news a lot, and lots of folks are having their say. I'll have mine: It's wrong.

I'm with Mark Cuban. Unlike him, I'm not a billionaire. Like him, I am not an economist (thank god), and I agree with common sense. Common sense tells me that QE2 is wrong. Government solutions to market problems have failed in the past, and they will fail again.

Here are some of the reasons why QE2 is wrong:

Well it's time for Markets Gone Wild, but you may not have the DVD, so let's recap: The Fed has been heavily telegraphing an accelerated money-printing schedule, driving bankers, traders, and speculators into all matter of commodities, stocks, and various exotic financial instruments.

Here's a summary:

* Silver reached a new 30-year high this morning. Incredibly bullish action. I think you should stay long silver here, a way to do that is SLV, or a mining company like Pan American Silver (PAAS), or silver futures. (Disclosure: I'm long all of the above). I've been bullish on silver for what seems like forever, and I remain so.

* Gold made a new high, and pulled back. With more money-printing on the way, it looks poised to break out, again.

* Our Riverbed/FFIV pairs trade worked out okay, in a strange way. F5 Networks (FFIV) has climbed 14% since we spotlighted the idea (we were short), but Riverbed (RVBD) is up 30% (we were long), so if you did the pairs long/short trade the difference has netted about 15%. Not bad for a month's work. The philosophy of this trade worked out okay -- the cloud "bubble" had pushed FFIV to a more unreasonalbe valuation, and it was time for Riverbed to catch up. (Disclosure: I am out of the trade, I think "cloud networking stocks" are getting overextended, though I still like Riverbed long term).

* New highs in stocks we like: EBIX, RVBD, PAAS

* Remember Right Now (RNOW)? Incredibly strong stock. Methinks something is up.

Wow. Things have really taken off here. Stocks, commodities, and most notably -- the precious metals. Gold is at an all-time nominal high of 1372 and silver at 20-year highs. Copper is pushing aggressively higher.

The trigger for the greedfest was yesterday's release of the Fed minutes, in which the fed governors indicated they are *this close* to unleashing the hounds of quantitative easing.

For those not into the Fed inside baseball or with only a passing knowledge of economics, "Quantitive Easing" is a central banker euphemism for "printing money." There is a reason why they call him Helicopter Ben. The phrase is interesting in that it makes money printing sound exotic and alluring, though it is not that at all: It's printing money.

Quantitative easing may sound sexy if you are an academic economist from Princeton, but in reality it is the siren song for central bankers. They can be dragged into the rocks very quickly. What can go wrong? Well, just take a look at the 1970s. Money-printing seemed great until inflation and the price of oil got out of control and pretty soon you were looking at 18% mortgage rates.

As I've been writing on this site for some time, the only way to prepare for this is to participate in the rally -- of everything -- but to keep tight stops on your trades and hedge with a healthy precious metals position. Metals are still outperforming everthing else, which is a symptom of central banker money printing gone wild. Think about the fact that the precious metals have been appreciating 10-15% per year for 10 years, while stocks are basically flat. That is the byproduct of money-printing: It has an unintended consequence on hard assets which are reflecting the devaluation of a currency.

Well, Ben Bernanke appears to be winning over the gloom-and-doom crowd, at least today.  What an impressive rally. I was surfing some data trying to rationalize it, and I have noticed some interesting changes going on in the market. The clue may be in the money supply.

If you look at recent charts of the money supply as put together by the dark, yet excellent analysis of government statistics over on Shadowstats.com, John Williams's site, you can see something that is truly intriguing: an uptick in the money supply growth rates.

Source: Shadowstats.com