Over the last couple of week’s, volatility has certainly picked up. As shown in the chart below, stocks have vacillated in a 1.5% trading range ever since the beginning of June. (Chart through Thursday) Despite the pickup in volatility, support for the market has remained firm. Importantly, this...

The past decade’s historically low interest rates convinced millions of Americans to buy cars they could only afford with hyper-cheap credit. This made auto sales one of the drivers of the recovery, but it also left far too many people with underwater “car mortgages” that will limit their spen...

At the end of June the inflation-adjusted S&P 500 index price was 99% above its long-term trend, unchanged from the previous month. About the only certainty in the stock market is that, over the long haul, over performance turns into under performance and vice versa. Is there a pattern to this ...

Here is the latest update of a popular market valuation method using the most recent Standard & Poor’s “as reported” earnings and earnings estimates and the index monthly average of daily closes for the past month. For the earnings, see the table below created from Standard &am...

The borrower is the servant of the lender, and through the mechanism of government debt virtually the entire planet has become the servants of the global money changers.  Politicians love to borrow money, but over time government debt slowly but surely impoverishes a nation.  As the elite get gov...

Janet Yellen, Federal Reserve Chair, recently stated; “Will I say there will never, ever be another financial crisis? No, probably that would be going too far. But I do think we’re much safer and I hope that it will not be in our lifetimes and I don’t believe it will.”  That is a pretty b...

The US stock markets have enjoyed an extraordinary surge this year, shattering all kinds of records.  It’s been fueled by hopes for big tax cuts soon from Trump’s Republican government.  But such relentless rallying has catapulted complacency, euphoria, and valuations to dangerous bull-slaying...

Last week, I received the following email from a reader which I thought was worth further discussion. “In a recent article “Signs of Excess – Crowding and Innovation” Lance stated ‘Note the chart above is what has happened to a $100,000 investment in the S&P Index. While the S&P ...

Yesterday, I addressed the issue of how market innovations and “crowding” into specific trades have been signs of market excesses in the past. To wit: “That is the cycle of innovation in the financial marketplace. Despite the best of intentions, and advances in innovation, humans will always ...

I have a friend… let’s call him Larry. Let’s just say, Larry is not a fan of taking risks. He likes his reflexes fast, his cars slow, and his financial markets secure for the long haul. So, when Larry called me up at the beginning of this year to say he’s boarding the highly-...

The NYSE has released new data for margin debt, now available through May. The New York Stock Exchange publishes end-of-month data for margin debt on the NYX data website, where we can also find historical data back to 1959. Let’s examine the numbers and study the relationship between marg...

I have regularly written about the many shortcomings of human psychology when it comes to investing. More importantly, while the emotions of “greed” and “fear” are the predominant drivers of not only investor behavior over time, they are also attributable to the development and delivery of t...

All eight indexes on our world watch list have posted gains for 2017 through June 26. The top performer thus far is China’s Hang Seng with a gain of 17.60%, followed by India’s BSE SENSEX not far behind at 16.94%. In third is our own S&P 500 with 8.94%. The Last Four Weeks The table...

I recently came across a December 1996 San Jose Mercury News article on tech pioneers’ attempts to carry the pre-browser Internet’s bulletin board community vibe over to the new-fangled World Wide Web. In effect, the article is talking about social media a decade before MySpace and Facebook and ...

Beginning in December of last year, following the announcement by OPEC of a cut in oil production, I have discussed the “headwinds” that persist against a sustained rise in oil prices. “The supply/demand dynamics currently suggest that oil prices and energy-related investments could find a lon...

Gold has spent most of June grinding lower on balance, damaging sentiment and vexing traders.  Usual selling leading into the Fed’s latest rate hike contributed, but the summer doldrums are also in play.  Gold has typically suffered a seasonal lull this time of year, on waning investment demand...