Since the end of the financial crisis, each market decline has been met with support by the Federal Reserve either through “verbal accommodation” or directly through “monetary interventions.” Not surprisingly, investors have become “trained” each “dip” in the market is a reason to...

In this past weekend’s missive I wrote: “So…Should I “Buy The F*$(@!# NOKO?” My best guess currently is – probably. But not yet.” “In our portfolios, we will wait for confirmation the current sell-off has abated before adding additional risk exposure to portfolios. In recent ye...

Long credit cycles like the current one always end with a crash. But first they deteriorate. The headline numbers remain positive while under the surface a growing list of sectors start to falter. It’s only when the latter reach a critical mass that market psychology turns dark. How far along is t...

Have we now entered a time of major financial shaking?  On Thursday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 274 points.  The was the largest decline for the Dow since May, and high yield bonds were down dramatically as well.  Many are blaming the terror attack in Barcelona and “instability ...

Someday, stock, bond and real estate valuations will matter again. And the mechanism by which this return to sanity is achieved will probably be the torrent of money now flowing in from people who, for various reasons, don’t care about (or understand) the prices they’re paying. Millennials, for ...

Quick take: At the end of July the inflation-adjusted S&P 500 index price was 103% above its long-term trend, up from 101% 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 patt...

Over the last week, I was on vacation with my family taking a much-needed respite from the weekly workload. The good news is that usually when I go out of town, the market crashes. Such was not the case, and in fact, the Dow Industrials hit all-time highs. I pay little attention to the Dow due to t...

Currently, things could not be better. Stocks are hitting all time highs. Confidence is at record levels, and investors are “all in.” But maybe it is just for those reasons that we should take a pause. Records are records for a reason. Every strongly trending bull market throughout history has...

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....

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...

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 ...

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...

“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...

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...