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...

Lately, there has been a lot of chatter about the “Return Of Animal Spirits” as the catalyst to drive markets higher…and higher…and higher. But exactly what does that mean? Animal spirits came from the Latin term “spiritus animalis” which means the breath that awakens the human mind. Its...

We want this time to be different so badly, we can almost taste it. If you visit San Francisco, you will find it difficult to walk more than a few blocks in central S.F. without encountering a major construction project. It seems that every decrepit low-rise building in the city has been razed and i...

Back in February, our friends shared a lesson with subscribers that included a “very bullish chart pattern” in Starbucks (SBUX) — ahead of the 3-month 10% rally. Now, they’ve just posted a new video explaining the SBUX opportunity and preparing you for what’s next. Wa...

Global macro economic data has been weak for many years, but there’s now a very real chance of a world-wide recession happening in 2017. Why? A dramatic and worsening shortfall in new credit creation. The world’s major central banks have, again, done the world an enormous disservice.  Instead o...

The Elliott wave model often indicates a stock market outlook that’s at odds with the sentiment of the crowd. But, that’s okay. The crowd is usually wrong at major market turns. For example, two years ago on May 9, 2015, the bull market was six years old and the third longest in history...

I wanted to pick up on a discussion I started in this past weekend’s missive, with respect to both Friday’s rout in technology stocks as well as Monday’s rather nasty open. While the issue seemed to be a simple short-term rotation in the markets from large capitalization Technology and Discre...

The global financial system’s ever-increasing leverage pretty much guarantees another crisis in coming years — unless it’s pre-empted by new weapons that can, in theory, shut down entire national banking systems, thus screwing up the best-laid plans of today’s savers and investors. This seri...

The “Bond Bears” just can’t seem to catch a break.  Beginning in mid-2013, there have been numerous calls the 30-year bond bull market was dead. The reasoning was simplistic enough – economic growth was set to return pushing inflation, and ultimately interest rates, higher. Unfortunately, a...

Have you ever wondered why stocks just seem to keep going up no matter what happens?  For years, financial markets have been behaving in ways that seem to defy any rational explanation, but once you understand the role that central banks have been playing everything begins to make sense.  In the ...

With the markets breaking out to new highs, it is not surprising to see a continued stream of analysis grappling for bits of data to support the bullish mantra. As you know, I have increased equity allocations in models with the breakout, but this is a tactical position only as the fundamentals simp...

Note: This update incorporates the latest monthly close and the GDP Q1 Second Estimate data. Market Cap to GDP is a long-term valuation indicator that has become popular in recent years, thanks to Warren Buffett. Back in 2001 he remarked in a Fortune Magazine interview that “it is probably ...

As I discussed in this past weekend’s missive, the breakout of the market to new highs keeps our allocation model nearly fully allocated. However, while we are long, we are still holding onto a little larger than normal cash pile, and raised stop levels, to hedge some volatility risk during the...

The Elliott wave model has helped investors catch market turns for eight decades. As Frost & Prechter’s Wall Street classic book, Elliott Wave Principle, says: The Wave Principle is the best forecasting tool in existence. [It] imparts an immense amount of knowledge about the market’...

Quick take: At the end of May 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 patte...