“The world in which we live has an increasing number of feedback loops, causing events to be the cause of more events (say, people buy a book because other people bought it), thus generating snowballs and arbitrary and unpredictable planet-wide winner-take-all effects.” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb...

One mystery trader has made an extremely large bet that the stock market is going to crash by October, and if he is right he could potentially make up to 262 million dollars on the deal.  Fortunes were made and lost during the great financial crisis of 2008, and the same thing will happen again th...

Today’s release of the publicly available data from ECRI puts its Weekly Leading Index (WLI) at 144.8, up from the previous week. Year-over-year the four-week moving average of the indicator is now at 4.99%, down from 5.12% last week. The WLI Growth indicator is now at 2.6, up from the previo...

As we get into the midst of the Q2 earnings season, we can take a closer look at the results through the 1st quarter of the year. Despite the exuberance from the media over the “number of companies that beat estimates” during the most recent reported period, 12-month operating earnings per s...

A Potential Road Map for the End of the Current Bull Market & Economic Expansion History books refer to the last economic slowdown we experienced, triggered by the 2007-2008 financial crisis, as the Great Recession. Its impacts were so severe—the worst global recession since the Great Depress...

The gold-futures and silver-futures short positions held by speculators have rocketed up to extremes in recent weeks.  These elite traders are aggressively betting for further weakness in gold and silver prices.  But history has proven extreme shorts are a powerful contrarian indicator.  Right a...

On June 29, the Apple iPhone turned 10 years old. But, for many, the mood surrounding the milestone was less than celebratory. Reason being, in June alone, Apple Inc. (AAPL) plunged 6% to two-month lows amidst a broad-scale bruising of the global tech sector. And so, the cursor on some Smartphone s...

Speculators are running scared in the paper precious metals markets. And that’s a good thing. The past few months’ correction has finally led hedge funds and other technical/momentum traders to shed their long positions and load up on short bets. Meanwhile the Commercials, which tend to be right...

In Janet Yellen’s semi-annual testimony on Capitol Hill yesterday, she made reference to the ongoing strength of employment as one of the reasons for continuing to “normalize” monetary policy by lifting interest rates and reducing the existing bond holdings of the Federal Reserve. To wit: ...

Did you know that the federal government is going to spend more than 4 trillion dollars this year?  To put that into perspective, U.S. GDP for the entire year of 2017 is going to be somewhere between 18 and 19 trillion dollars.  So when you are talking about 4 trillion dollars you are talking abou...

The fragility of our financial buffers will only be revealed when they fail in the next crisis. While buffer has a specific meaning in chemistry, I am using the word in the broad sense of a reserve resource that absorbs the initial destructive impacts of crises or system overloads. Marshland alon...

The stars — in the form of smart and dumb money futures contract positions — have once again lined up favorably for precious metals. Here are those positions for gold and silver as of Tuesday the 4th. Notice that speculators (the dumb money) got a lot less optimistic — that is, less long and m...

Let’s have a look at a long-term perspective on Treasury yields as of Friday’s close. The chart below shows the 10-Year Constant Maturity yield since 1962 along with the Federal Funds Rate (FFR) and inflation. The range has been astonishing. The stagflation that set in after the 1973 Oi...

One of the primary keys to success in investment and speculation is picking the right stocks to trade.  That’s no mean feat, as it takes great effort, expertise, and time to winnow the whole field down to the likely winners with the best fundamentals.  Although deeply out of favor now in the su...

On the “Real Investment Hour” on Tuesday night, I addressed the issue of price versus fundamentals. In the short-term, a period of one-year or less, political, fundamental, and economic data has very little influence over the market. This is especially the case in a late-stage bull market adva...

Our friends at Elliott Wave International (EWI) regularly put out great free content on their site. If you’ve visited their site before, you may have seen “Chart of the Day,” a featured series of videos that take a quick, but close examination of a chart from one of EWI’s pai...