Flush with cash, some mega-investors can afford to be choosy.

Securities and some commodities across the globe will rise sharply as selling asset managers, those left standing, revise their portfolios in coming days and weeks.

The 18-month-long (and counting) abandonment of company securities and natural resources is being called a “100-year drought” in high-risk investments.

Many observers and strategists said the bad times would stage a final act … well, by now. They were mistaken. I am included in this class. I too counted at least 10 reasons why shrinking market capitalizations and slimming commodity and property prices were headed back to the fat farm. (See Thom’s 2007 articles by clicking here.)

At present, the handful of successful stakes in my world have been an Israeli generic drug developer, a Hong Kong Internet network serving China, premiums on 24-karat gold coins and a San Diego genomic tools maker. Years of research led me to these oases in the stinging desert sand.

I believe – and this is a tenet of the free ThomWatch service you view now the upcoming subscription service Ticker Trax By Thom Calandra – risk-oriented buyers will return to the desert. Some, the flush Saudi Arabians, Kuwaitis and various robed denizens of the United Arab Emirates, are from the desert.

Others will be the still standing asset managers (i.e., hedge funds, pension trusts, mutual funds, portfolio allocators and wealthy organizations and individuals) whose working hours are spent searching for returns on their capital.

Finally, the individuals who dwell in garage lofts and basements across the planet will return to the search for meaningful returns on their holdings, especially against a backdrop of sinking interest rates on certificates of deposit, bank accounts and money market funds.

How can I be so sure? Especially when my aptitude for big-picture analysis sometimes makes me appear to be the dullest tool in the shed? (My strong points are discovering and describing individual opportunities and then locating the people backing those positions and getting them on the record.)

My colleague and friend Jim Marx in Southern California, the photographer and grape grower who accompanied me on my visit to a Colombia gold mine earlier this year, regularly supplies me with the reasons why money is still exiting the fiber-optic flow of capital across latitudes and longitudes.

Sheiks in Zee Desert

Investors, he notes from a recent piece of TrimTabs Investment Research just up the road from our home here in Northern California, withdrew $43 billion from U.S. hedge funds in September.

TrimTabs expects the October withdrawals, which tend to be “geared” to borrowed funds, to be larger than those in September as asset managers meet margin calls for that borrowed money and redeem holdings so that they can repay limited partners and other fund holders by year’s end.

In a bizarre twist (and this is my take), company’s purchases of their own securities in the past 10 years might be working against security prices. Fewer shares outstanding lead to a lack of smooth trading of securities, even in the relentless down-ticking trend of this 18-month one. That, in turn, stirs choppy trading, investor panic and down gaps in prices.

What does it all mean? “It does mean high volatility through Dec. 1, for one,” says Marx, whose knack for locating extremely promising values is highly regarded in these quarters. “Great values in the market place for long-term holders, some tradable periods for options and the need for a good bomb shelter for the rest of the time,” he says. (Please click here for more on Jim Marx.)

One possible indicator for those of us interested in keeping tabs on the big-picture desert is the sharp swings of securities, as indicated by equity indexes in major markets (Toronto, New York, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong). The easiest way is probably the Chicago Board of Exchange’s so-called VIX, which gauges option contracts in an effort to forecast how “fearful” or “complacent” investors are about their holdings.

When no one (the general press especially) cares anymore, as Craig Reisfield of Ridley Asset Management told me the other day, it is time to start searching for selective purchases.

Of course, as Mr. Marx, a wise fellow who spent his family youth exposed to comic genius, snips, “We know the pain from this current market rout and actually are not sure if it is nearing a bottom but at the rate of collapse that the Dow and NASDAQ are experiencing, we only have around one month or so until the indexes reach zero!”

I expect our Abu Dhabi robed sheiks, flush with petro-bucks, and others across the planet (sovereign funds, for example) who hold non-margined vaults of capital, to start looking for their next 10-year holds. They will be selective – as they can afford to be picky.

Later this week, we will sneak preview the subscription report TICKER TRAX BY THOM CALANDRA.

It has been many years since my last service, The Calandra Report, put me at center stage and filled my spirit with a tad too much enthusiasm for the art of researching, globetrotting, then buying and selling stocks and other investments. I include here a link to one of The Calandra Report editions, kindly posted by the nice folks at database operator Fran Finnegan & Co. in San Francisco, just across Richardson Bay from our home. Click here to view it.

As stated in my work and on Stockhouse, I entirely recognize the shortcomings that led to my U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission settlement during those wonderful but manic weeks and months some years ago.

There is plenty more color, cosmic tears and even a life lesson or three in the interview editor Darin Diehl conducted with me not long ago. I know I am tooting my own French horn when I say the two-part interview is worth a brief scan … and can be seen by clicking here.

Ticker Trax By Thom Calandra will explore planet Earth for those few stakes that offer the prospect of excellent, in some cases cosmic, returns. It is for those who are entirely at ease with stratospheric levels of risk.

As we complete our investment research, we fully hope and expect, but cannot and do not promise, stratospheric returns. For example: I personally have been bewildered by the whupping that risk-leaning investments have – I want to say endured but have they really? – have taken these past (choose one) 18 days/weeks/months.

Our audience, we hope, will become part of a small entourage of garage-loft investors who can rely on one another for insights from the attic, for secrets buried in zee basement and of course, for lower-back massages and a hand to hold in times of mead.

We do hope to increase wealth of knowledge, scope of understanding and size of holdings. We do not envision compiling a portfolio designed for daily, weekly or monthly trading. More TK, as in to come.

HOLDINGS: Thom’s cosmos of holdings is listed for free Stockhouse members on www.Stockhouse.com under the “portfolio setting” for user TCALANDRA. For more ThomWatch, please see Stockhouse and ThomCalandra.com.

THOM’S STORY: For investors who profited from a meteoric rise of commodities, mining and life sciences companies, Thom Calandra acted as a beacon. Thom helped his audience find value in a quagmire of investment choices. Thom co-founded and was the driving editorial force and spirit of CBS MarketWatch, MarketWatch.com and FT MarketWatch in Europe. As the voice of Thom Calandra's StockWatch and The Calandra Report, Thom fancied $300-ounce gold before that metal became an investment rage. Thom visited bioscience companies, metals mines and scores of thin-crust pie joints across the planet in a search for profit, fashion and pizze de trippa gorgonzola. Thom's novel PABLO BY NUMBERS was completed in summer 2008.