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 ...

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...

In their policy announcement last week, the members of the FOMC claimed: “Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in May indicates that the labor market has continued to strengthen and that economic activity has been rising moderately so far this year.” Economic data has...

The Q Ratio is a popular method of estimating the fair value of the stock market developed by Nobel Laureate James Tobin. It’s a fairly simple concept, but laborious to calculate. The Q Ratio is the total price of the market divided by the replacement cost of all its companies. Fortunately, th...

The entire global economy now depends on this stripped-of-information “market” for its stability. Ho-hum, another day, another record high in the S&P 500 (SPX). What is this market telling us? If you’re long, the market is screaming “you’re a genius!”: But ot...

In some states, when a couple enters into divorce, the court may award “alimony,” or spousal support, to one of the former spouses for the express purpose of limiting any unfair economic effects by providing a continuing income to the spouse. The purpose is to help that spouse continue the “s...

On Monday, the markets broke out, again, to all-time highs. This is not surprising and something that I noted over the weekend. To wit:  “Stepping back from the sector-specific action, if you only looked at the S&P 500 to judge what was happening in the markets, you wouldn’t suspect anythin...

Towards the end of the 1990’s tech stock bubble, “new media” – i.e., the Internet — was ascendant and old media like magazines, newspapers and broadcast TV were yesterday’s news. This was reflected in relative stock valuations, which gave Internet pioneer AOL the ability to buy vene...

If something happens seven times in a row, do you think that there is a pretty good chance that it will happen the eighth time too?  Immediately prior to the last seven recessions, we have seen an inverted yield curve, and it looks like it is about to happen again for the very first time since the...

No! I am not talking about President Trump but rather the crash in both Technology stocks, and Oil prices, which are obstructing the continuation of the “bull market.”  As I discussed this past Tuesday, the mini “flash crash” in Technology certainly woke investors up. “While there is cer...

All of a sudden the Fed got a little tougher. Perhaps the success of the hit movie Wonder Woman has inspired Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen to discard her prior timidity to show us how much monetary muscle she can flex when the time comes for action. Although the Fed’s decision this week to ...

Not even during the worst parts of the last recession did things ever get this bad for the U.S. retail industry.  As you will see in this article, more than 300 retailers have already filed for bankruptcy in 2017, and it is being projected that a staggering 8,640 stores will close in America by th...