Category Archive: Finance
How To Get Involved In The Drug Trade (It’s Not What You Think)
Eli Lilly & Co. (LLY), one of the world’s largest drug manufacturers, has seen its stock go nowhere for 2 years. We don’t know many participants who would like a 0% return for 24 months. But this nowhere action is perfectly normal behavior. After all, Eli Lilly was up over 350% from the bottom in 2009 through September 2015. That’s […]
Weather In The Driver’s Seat
It should be clear to all participants in the natural gas futures market that weather is significantly driving price action. Much of the rally in prices this week can be attributed to the addition of heating demand expectations in the long-range forecast, as far colder weather is expected across the country to close out Friday. […]
2 Stocks To Suffer As U.S. Fails To Qualify For 2018 World Cup
It was a day of anguish for U.S. fans as its soccer team failed to qualify for the 2018 FIFA World Cup for the first time since 1986, following a shocking defeat at the hands of Trinidad & Tobago. The U.S. national team’s failure to make the final cut might impact the financials of a […]
The Big Four Economic Indicators: September Real Retail Sales
Note: With the release of September Retail Sales and the Consumer Price Index, we’ve updated this commentary to include the latest Real Retail Sales. Official recession calls are the responsibility of the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee, which is understandably vague about the specific indicators on which they base their decisions. This committee statement is about as close […]
Oil Sector Earnings Starting To Stabilize?
Since the beginning of the year, the stock of ExxonMobil (XOM(has lost significant ground, down near 10% on the year. This is in contrast to British Petroleum (BP), which is near breakeven, and Shell (RDS-A), which is up close to 10% year to date. While the stock sector beta is a challenge to calculate based on […]
Social Security Payments Up 2% Next Year
Monthly Social Security and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits for more than 66 million Americans will increase 2.0 percent in 2018, the Social Security Administration announced Friday. The 2.0 percent cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) will begin with benefits payable to more than 61 million Social Security beneficiaries in January 2018. Increased payments to more than 8 […]
Update On Q4 Pivot View For Stocks And Gold
Stock Market Status In our August 11 article Potential Pivots Upcoming for Stocks and Gold, we noted several legs that could be kicked out from under the S&P 500’s table in Q4 2017. The stock market blew right through one of them, which was a bearish (on average) seasonal trend for the 2nd half of […]
The Curious Case Of Missing The Market Boom
Rembrandt Old man with a beard 1630 “The Cost of Missing the Market Boom is Skyrocketing”, says a Bloomberg headline today. That must be the scariest headline I’ve seen in quite a while. For starters, it’s misleading, because people who ‘missed’ the boom haven’t lost anything other than virtual wealth, which is also the only thing those […]
One Brilliant Thing Is Way Better Than 1000 Average Ones
I’ve blogged on some of the themes I’m going to cover below, but the story gets clearer and clearer in my head the more I blog about and talk about it, so this version may be a little clearer than some that have gone before. The first is that banks’ organisational structures have to move […]
The Donald Can’t Stop It
The Dow’s march onward and upward toward 30,000 continues without a pause. New all-time highs are notched practically every day. Despite Thursday’s 31-point pullback, the Dow is up over 15.5 percent year-to-date. What a remarkable time to be alive. The DJIA keeps surging… but it is running on fumes (US money supply growth is disappearing […]
