“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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

You can almost hear the announcer for the movie trailer; “In a world stricken by financial crisis, a country plagued by spiraling deficits and cities on the verge of collapse – a war is being waged; gauntlet’s thrown down and at the heart of it all; two dead white guys battling over the fate o...

“There is nothing wrong with America that the faith, love of freedom, intelligence, and energy of her citizens cannot cure.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower “If we just stick together, and remain true to our ideals, we can be sure that America’s greatest days lie ahead.” – Ronald Reagan Hope ...

Here is a summary of the four market valuation indicators we update on a monthly basis. The Crestmont Research P/E Ratio (more) The cyclical P/E ratio using the trailing 10-year earnings as the divisor (more) The Q Ratio, which is the total price of the market divided by its replacement cost (more...

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...

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 ...