Is Santa On His Way?

There is an indicator for everything.  There is a prediction based on who wins the Super Bowl.  There is a prediction based on the length of skirts for a particular year.  The list goes on and on. 
The unusual nature of some of these indicators is their accuracy.  For instance, there is the January Barometer. Every [...]

Read Full Post »

Fire!

Unemployment is mysteriously reporting only a loss of -11,000.  Poof, just like that we transition from 100,000 and 200,000 plus jobs losses each month to just 11,000 without even a transition.  The unemployment rate has come down from 10.2% to 10%.  So what do these numbers really tell us about the economy?
Really nothing…
The unemployment rate [...]

Read Full Post »

December 7th Outlook

The stock market outlook for this week will be posted later this evening.  Please check back later.

Read Full Post »

Wake Up and Smell the Risk

Cracks in the foundation are starting to rear their ugly heads and investors need to wake up smell the risk.  In my latest client newsletter, I wrote about the great disconnect that exists between Wall Street and Main Street.  On the one hand, you have Wall Street who just assumes that this is a normal [...]

Read Full Post »

Happy Thanksgiving

We will be taking the week off this week and a new stock market update will be posted next week.
Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Read Full Post »

The Ultimate Bubble of Hope

We have had all types of bubbles in the history of the investment markets.  According to Jeremy Grantham, there have been 28 different types of bubbles from gold to art to real estate to stocks and even tulips.  Yes, there was an enormous tulip mania.  Bubbles are created out of a mania.  Manias are created [...]

Read Full Post »

What the Economic Data is Not Telling Us

It was announced Friday morning that 190,000 jobs were lost, which is higher than economists predicted.   That is significant for one reason.  At this stage in the game, we should NOT be seeing this amount of jobs being lost.  Companies get to the point where they stop laying people off because they have already cut to [...]

Read Full Post »

Financial Crisis Alive and Well

Every Friday, all across the country, bankers hold their breath.  This is the day that the FDIC chooses to show up and take over banks that are on the verge of failure.  This past Friday, FDIC employees were especially busy when they showed up at 9 different banks.   The banks had combined assets of 19.4 billion [...]

Read Full Post »

What the Government Bond Markets are Saying About Stocks, the Dollar, and Gold

Did you ever wonder why mortgage rates have been so low this year?  Well, let me take you on a journey.  Mortgage rates are influenced by government bond interest rates.  Government bond interest rates are influenced by the price of Government bonds.  If bond prices go up, then interest rates go down.  In order to [...]

Read Full Post »

Break Out the Dow 10,000 Party Hats

Being in the business of money management, you are almost held hostage to financial television. You have to watch a certain amount of it to catch breaking news. Besides the CNBC cheerleaders celebrating Dow 10,000, that level is nothing more than a round number with 4 zeros. Sorry, President Obama, it is neither a milestone [...]

Read Full Post »

Potential Market Myths

A client of mine forwards me an e-mail from time to time that he receives from another financial advisor.  These e-mails are typically very positive on the state of the market.  I also find that they are filled with what I would refer to as market myths.  I thought I would share some of these with [...]

Read Full Post »

Unemployment Starting to Look a Lot Like the 30’s

Unemployment numbers came out last Friday and they paint a very concerning situation.   The unemployment rate is 9.8% and the economy lost another 263,000 jobs.  That is 22 months in a row of job losses.  I looked back at historical data that I have that goes back to 1939 and cannot find a string of [...]

Read Full Post »

Cash Levels of Mutual Funds Can Be a Good/Bad Indicator

There all types of indicators that you can look at in the stock market that can give you an idea of what might lie ahead.  Many of the indicators that I follow would suggest that we are nearing the end of this stock market rally which began March of this year.  One of the areas [...]

Read Full Post »

Financial Hurricane Getting Stronger

In 2006, I was writing to my clients in my private client letter about what I felt was occurring in the financial markets.  I described what I felt was coming as a Category 5 hurricane.  I think that I even named it Hurricane Greenspan at the time.  Although he is a distant memory, he had [...]

Read Full Post »

Price Level Alert

One of the most important aspects of determining risk in the stock market is watching price levels.  A price level is where the stock market closes at the end of the day.  If the S&P 500 ends the day at 895, that is the price level that we want to analyze.  Think of price levels [...]

Read Full Post »