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 margin debt and the market, using the S&P 500 as the surrogate for the latter...

I know…I know… There seems to be absolutely nothing that can derail the current bull market. Geopolitical conflict – NOPE Political intrigue – NOPE Fed Reserve reducing liquidity to the markets – NOPE Lack of expected tax cuts, reform, and infrastructure spending – NOPE, NOPE, and NOPE....

The dollar has been falling lately, which isn’t what a lot of people expected with the Fed being the only major central bank that’s raising interest rates. Higher yields on dollar balances should, according to basic economics, have attracted foreign capital to Treasury paper, thus putting upward...

Over the last two years, sugar futures have crashed and spiked and crashed again — much like a diabetic without insulin. After plummeting to an 8-year low in September 2015, sugar prices then doubled in a stunning rally to a 4-year high in September 2016, only to turn back down in a 40% sell-o...

The gold miners’ stocks have suffered a lackluster year so far, mostly lagging gold’s solid new upleg.  But that vexing underperformance should soon give way to a big catch-up surge.  The deeply-out-of-favor gold stocks are now entering their strong season, which starts right about now with a ...

As a portfolio manager, I start each morning by consuming copious amounts of a heavily caffeinated beverage and a data feed from a litany of web and blog sites. Over the last few days, as asset prices have set new records, there have been numerous articles on whether the market is currently in a bu...

Ominously for the stock markets, the Federal Reserve is warning that quantitative tightening is coming later this year.  The Fed is on the verge of starting to drain its vast seas of new money conjured out of thin air over the past decade or so.  The looming end of this radically-unprecedented eas...

Okay, I have to discuss something this week that has been bugging me. I have had several emails as of late suggesting one of the biggest investing fallacies stated during late stage bull market advances. “I don’t care about the price, I bought it for the yield.” First of all, let’s clear up ...

For an in-depth discussion of blockchain and cryptocurrencies see the June 2017 white paper published by the World Economic Forum: “Realizing the Potential of Blockchain: A Multistakeholder Approach to the Stewardship of Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies” (www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Realizing_Pote...

What’s the last big toy you buy when things have been good for a really long time and you already have all the other toys? An RV, of course. A dubious thing to own if you already have a house, but when the good times seem likely to roll on forever, why the hell not? And what’s the first thing yo...

If you study these charts closely, you can only conclude that the US economy is doomed to secular stagnation and never-ending recession. The stock market, bond yields and statistical measures of the economy can be gamed, manipulated and massaged by authorities, but the real economy cannot. This is e...

One of the crucial things to understand about today’s world is that money is fungible. Whether it’s created in Japan, Europe, China or the US, once it’s tossed by a central bank into one or another part of the global economy, it eventually finds its way to a common pool of liquidity. So the mo...

“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...