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...

Here is the latest update of a popular market valuation method using the most recent Standard & Poor’s “as reported” earnings and earnings estimates and the index monthly average of daily closes for the past month. For the earnings, see the table below created from Standard &am...

How can a company that is going to generate $2,000,000,000 in negative free cash flow in 2017 be worth 70 billion dollars?  Netflix has soared in popularity in recent years, but so have their financial losses. Just like during the original tech bubble, investors are ignoring basic fundamentals and...

With the markets closed on Monday, there really isn’t much to update you on “technically” from this past weekend’s missive. The important point, if you haven’t read it, was: “The failure of the market to rotate to the “risk on” trade should not be lightly dismissed.  A healthy brea...

Gravity eventually overpowers financial fakery. When debt-asset bubbles expand at rates far above the expansion of earnings and real-world productive wealth, their collapse is inevitable. The Supernova model of financial collapse is one way to understand this. As I noted yesterday in Will the Crazy ...

Housing is hot again, but lately it’s been overshadowed by flashier bubbles in government debt, tech stocks and possibly cryptocurrencies. Still, the warning signs are spreading. Today’s Wall Street Journal, for instance, reports that homeowners are back to using their houses as ATMs: Homeowner...

If everything is going to be “just fine”, why are so many big names in the financial community warning about an imminent meltdown?  I don’t think that I have seen so many simultaneous warnings about a market crash since just before the great financial crisis of 2008.  And at this point, you...

There are multiple sources of friction in the Perpetual Motion Money Machine. We’ve been playing two games to mask insolvency: one is to pay the costs of rampant debt today by borrowing even more from future earnings, and the second is to create wealth out of thin air via asset bubbles. The t...