Markets are rocking and rolling today, and my planned piece is taking a little more elbow grease than expected… so in lieu of that, I offer you my favorite Wired article of all time. The High Tech Trifecta is all about the world of high stakes horse racing. As the piece leads off, They’ve...
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Barry Ritholtz has an intriguing post up,”Do US Bonds Resemble Dot Com Stocks?” His basic thesis, as backed up by observations from Tobias Levkovich and Dave Wilson, is that USTs are acting like dot com stocks circa 1997-1998 in three key ways: 1) You knew momentum was taking them (much) higher; 2) You knew...
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Paul McCulley, a managing director at bond giant PIMCO, just recently posted his latest Global Central Bank Focus. (You can read it in full here.) I’ve been reading McCulley’s monthly missives for years, and I almost always enjoy them. McCulley is down to earth and extremely smart. He is also a die-hard Keynesian, which...
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Note: This article is the first in a series. Also available: IMA Part II: The Market Tower IMA Part III: Horizontal & Vertical Exposure Legendary poker player David “Chip” Reese, who routinely earned several million dollars a year as a regular in the Bellagio’s “Big Game” before his untimely death at age 56, once...
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In recent months, some investors and traders have openly wondered “Why would deflation be so bad.” Well, that’s a pretty involved topic. But from a simple market standpoint, we can look to the Japan experience: We’ve become so used to Japanese Government Bonds yielding next to nothing, that’s it’s easy to forget that...
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Sobering stuff… PHOENIX — During the great housing boom, homeowners nationwide borrowed a trillion dollars from banks, using the soaring value of their houses as security. Now the money has been spent and struggling borrowers are unable or unwilling to pay it back. The delinquency rate on home equity loans is higher than all...
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McDonald’s this week raised $450 million in 10-year debt at 3.5%, a record low yield for a large batch of debt issued by a U.S. corporate borrower. — WSJ, Global Corporate-Bond Boom Gains Pace As the old saying goes, “Them that has gets.” Yield-hungry investors, desperate for a place to put cash to work,...
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I was not pitting my tape-reading knack or my hunches against chance. The inexorable logic of events was making money for me. - Reminiscences of a Stock Operator In Reminiscences of a Stock Operator — arguably the greatest trading book of all time — Jesse Livermore (aka Larry Livingston) placed deep emphasis on two...
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This is pretty cool, from Wall Street Cheat Sheet via TBP. Click the image for larger view. I also have a comment posted on TBP relating to emotional extremes and market sentiment, which you can find here.
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Buckle your seat belt Dorothy, cause Kansas? It’s goin’ bye-bye. – The Matrix Michael Pettis, the Beijing-based deep thinker over at China Financial Markets, has an excellent piece up titled What might history tell us about the Greek crisis? It’s not just about Greece, though, and more about historical precedents as they extend to...
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You’ve probably heard the old expression, “Buy the rumor, sell the news.” Wednesday’s action gives a clear example of exactly what that means. XHB, the popular homebuilders ETF, has been in a pronounced downtrend since late April. On June 23rd, the market was rocked by record low new home sales — a number considered...
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Profit margins for U.S. companies are likely to tumble from last quarter’s record, a decline that will lead to much lower earnings than analysts expect, according to economist Andrew Smithers… - BB, Profit Margin Outlook for U.S. is ‘Extremely Bad’ One of the major equity juicing factors for the 2009 rally was behind-the-curve analysts....
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Joshua Brown at The Reformed Broker has a great post up, Why They All Got the BP Call Wrong. It’s about the folly of Wall Street analysts rushing in to call BP “cheap” and a “buy” so soon after the Deepwater Horizon blowup, even when the risks — legal, environmental and political — were...
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Gold is breaking out to new all-time highs today — in nominal terms at least. (Inflation adjusted highs would put gold above $2,000 per ounce.) This is telling against the backdrop of a low and falling Core CPI (Consumer Price Index). The above chart, from Bespoke Investment Group, shows that Core CPI is the...
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I thought random walk was bullshit… The whole idea that an individual can’t make serious money with a competitive edge over the rest of the market is wacko. - F. Helmut Weymar, founder of Commodities Corp If one could point to a single organization that really kicked things off — a sort of Mount...
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