Another year has come and gone. 2019 was a breakout year for the US economy and global stock markets. Heading into last year, investors and analysts were guarded given the Federal Reserve’s blunder in 2018’s fourth quarter, which I refer to as, “The Powell Panic of 2018.” We spent several months reversing the economic and […]
As 2019 began, I published My Gut Feeling For 2019. Now that 2019 is in the books, I want to look back at how my expectations and predictions fared in 2019. Recall these predictions were made in the spirit of the old Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser show in that they were fixed a year […]
Every year since 2002, I have closed out the year with my satirical look at the world through the eyes of a professional investor/writer poking fun at what has transpired in our global society during the year about to end. The year 2019 has brought forth its own unique series of unexpected news, celebration, joy, […]
Remarkably it was a quiet week for the market. Though, on Friday the great news for the week began to get imputed into stock prices. So, what happened last week? Stock investors and the markets here in the United States hit a grand slam. In baseball, a grand slam refers to a homerun with the […]
It is often said that “Bull Markets Don’t Die of Old Age.” In fact, it is Bear Markets that kill Bull Markets. What creates a Bear Market is a combination of economic events. Those events are a significant tightening of credit (not necessarily a Fed tightening cycle), a sustained loss of jobs and investor apathy; […]
What a difference a month makes. Maybe we needed a string of holidays to regroup after a difficult September, when as you might remember, as I emphasized, a weak IPO market knocked the stuffing out of growth stocks. Perhaps, the final destruction of WeWork; which was a Ponzi scheme that failed to launch an IPO; […]
September, not October as conventional wisdom wrongly believes, is the worst month of the year for the stock market. This September is no different. However, in 2019 it was growth that felt the greatest damage. The proximate cause, in my opinion is the IPO market. In the glory days of IPO markets, new companies would […]
August is usually a quiet month, except when some exogenous event occurs. This August however, people were trying to create exogenous events. Frankly, this is disconcerting to me and many market professionals. On August 14, the equity markets took a steep dive – about 3% – when the yield curve on the short end briefly […]
The equity markets tanked on Monday after China devalued its currency, the Renminbi (sometimes called the Yuan), to its lowest level in over a decade. That was in retaliation for President Trump raising tariffs by 10% on $300 billion in goods. The latter was insignificant as it only amounts to a maximum of $30 billion […]
It is always a bit of a balancing act, as markets rise to new highs, to decide whether to, as we say in Las Vegas, “let it ride” or “take some money off the table.” There are of course many factors to consider such as: how individual stocks measure up against their own price targets; […]
