Category Archive: Finance
Flying Blind, Part 2: The Destruction Of Honest Price Discovery And Its Consequences
In Part 1 we noted that the real evil of Bubble Finance is not merely that it leads to bubble crashes, of which there is surely a doozy just around the bend; or that speculators get the painful deserts they fully deserve, which is coming big time, too; or even that the retail homegamers are always drawn into the slaughter at the very end, […]
The Market Was More Bullish
My Swing Trading Approach I added two trades to the portfolio yesterday, was whipped out of a another for a small profit. I will look to keep the portfolio the same, with little changes to it, beyond increasing my stops. If a great opportunity comes my way, I may pull the trigger on it. Indicators […]
FHFA House Price Index: Index Up 0.4% In November
The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) has released its U.S. House Price Index (HPI) for November. Here is the opening of the report: The FHFA House Price Index (HPI) reported a 0.4 percent increase in U.S. house prices in November from the previous month. From November 2016 to November 2017, house prices were up 6.5 […]
EC Speculative Exposure At An Unprecedented Level
Traders Don’t Care About Protection The price of the puts compared to calls is 2 standard deviations below the 5 year average as you can see in the chart below. You would think with stocks going up in a straight line, investors would seek to buy protection to lock in their gains. However, euphoria makes […]
December 2017 Headline Existing Home Growth Declines But Up For Whole Of 2017
The headline existing home sales growth declined with the authors saying “new listings struggled to keep up with what was sold very quickly, and buying became less affordable in a large swath of the country“. Our analysis of the unadjusted data is a bleaker picture than the headline data. Analyst Opinion of Existing Home Sales […]
Dividend Stocks Vs. Annuities — Which Are Better?
At Sure Dividend, we are huge proponents of investing in high-quality dividend growth stocks. Among the thousands of dividend stocks out there, investors can focus on the “cream of the crop”: the Dividend Aristocrats, and the Dividend Kings. The Dividend Aristocrats are a group of stocks in the S&P 500 Index with 25+ consecutive years […]
Existing Home Sales Drop 3.6% As Supply Hits 19-Year Low
Economists expected home sales to dip a bit. Instead, home sales fell towards the bottom guess. Supply hit a record low. The Econoday consensus estimate for December existing home sales was 5.75 million units at a seasonally-adjusted annualized rate (SAAR). Instead, home sales fell 3.6% to 5.57 million units in a range of 5.5 million […]
Brazil Stocks Soar To All Time High After Lula Loses Corruption Sentence Appeal
Brazilian assets soared, with the Bovespa surging above 83,000 for the first time ever, and the BRL surging through 3.20 after three judges in a local appeals court upheld a conviction for corruption imposed last July on ex-President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. While Lula can still take his appeal to a higher court, the […]
Minecraft And Crusoe Economics
Austrian economists often employ the pedagogy called “Crusoe economics” to illustrate the foundational principles of economic theory. Robinson Crusoe is alone on an island. He has nothing but his own body at his disposal, and he needs to find food and construct a shelter to survive. So what does he do? He starts punching trees, […]
Did Mnuchin Signal A Policy Shift Today?
Did US Treasury Secretary Mnuchin signal a change in the US dollar policy? Probably not. As Mnuchin and President Trump have done before, a distinction was drawn between short- and longer-term perspectives. In the short-term, a weaker dollar says Mnuchin, is good for US trade and “other opportunities”. In the longer-term, Mnuchin explicitly acknowledged, “the strength […]
