A friend reached out to me today and asked me a simple question: “If the average person gets a $3000 tax refund every year and then invests the refund into the S&P 500, what would their end result look like?”  No problem. All we need to do is make a few quick assumptions. Historically, goi...

It’s impossible to predict with certainty how much more insane our financial markets will get before an inevitable correction. But my personal bet is: A lot! For my reasons why, take a few minutes to watch the chapter on bubbles below from The Crash Course. For those who haven’t seen it ...

Current stock market valuations are not sustainable.  If there is one thing that I want you to remember from this article, it is that cold, hard fact.  In 1929, 2000 and 2008, stock prices soared to absolutely absurd levels just before horrible stock market crashes.  What goes up must eventually ...

Gold has powered higher in a strong new upleg since the Fed’s mid-December rate hike.  But the core group of traders who usually fuel early-upleg gains has been missing in action in recent months.  The gold-futures speculators have not done any meaningful buying since gold bottomed.  This anoma...

At PeakProsperity.com, we pride ourselves on providing fact-based context to breaking important events. Within 72 hours of the Japan tsunami in 2011, we had analyzed the situation and concluded with high probability that three core meltdowns had occurred at the Fukushima nuclear plant. While it took...

Last week Frank Chaparro penned an interesting note: “It looks like this bull market just won’t quit. Friday marked the 2,003rd trading day since the stock market rally began back in 2009, making it even longer than the bull market that preceded the 1929 crash. And since President Donald Trump�...

Every few years, it seems, one or another mismanaged eurozone country falls into one or another kind of crisis. This leads to speculation about the end of the common currency, which in turn spooks the global financial markets. Then the ECB conjures another trillion euros out of thin air, buys up and...

In this past weekend’s newsletter, I discussed my remembrances of the Riddler in the original Batman series and how he would pose riddles to the dynamic duo as they faced the certain demise. In that vein, I posed the following question: “IF investment success is achieved by ‘buying when others...

You’d think that by now every relevant measure of stock market overvaluation would have been converted into a chart and circulated throughout the blogosphere. But Zero Hedge has come up with a new one depicting how long the typical wage slave has to work to buy the typical stock. And – surprise ...

As discussed yesterday, the exuberance in the markets, as witnessed by the net positioning of large speculators, has reached records on both ends of the spectrum. Those extremes, combined with spiking levels of “hope” in both the financial and economic data is all too reminiscent of the past. I...

The gold miners’ stocks have blasted higher in this young new year, far outpacing the broader markets.  But surprisingly gold stocks’ trading volume has diverged from their powerful rally.  Volume has actually been waning on balance since gold stocks’ newest upleg was born in mid-December. ...

In 1980, the US government – along with pretty much all of its peers – began borrowing at an accelerating rate. Note on the following chart how the trend line steepened in the 2000s and then steepened again in this decade, with a sudden and unexpected pop in 2015 and early 2016, even as the curr...

Is the U.S. economy about to get slammed by a major recession?  According to Gallup, U.S. economic confidence has soared to the highest level ever recorded, but meanwhile a whole host of key economic indicators are absolutely screaming that a new recession is beginning.  And if the U.S. economy do...

There is little doubt currently that complacency reigns in the financial markets. Nowhere is that complacency more evident than in the Market Greed/Fear Index which combines the 4-measures of investor sentiment (AAII, INVI, MarketVane, & NAAIM) with the inverse Volatility Index. The reason I r...

Gold stocks are on fire this year, powering higher in market-dominating performance.  This is a massive reversal from their dark fourth quarter, with 6/7ths of those losses already erased.  But this strong new upleg still remains young and small by historical standards.  Gold stocks’ recent ral...

Here is a summary of the four market valuation indicators we update on a monthly basis. The Crestmont Research P/E Ratio (more) The cyclical P/E ratio using the trailing 10-year earnings as the divisor (more) The Q Ratio, which is the total price of the market divided by its replacement cost (more...