Christmas is big, no doubt about it. How big depends on what type of retail. Highest honors for big holiday volume goes to sporting goods, electronics, and clothing, but general merchandise and non-store retailers (like Amazon) are close behind. Lower holiday season sales occur at car dealers, building materials stores and gas stations. The easy…
Photo Credit: [email protected] I’ve been busier than ever of late — not much time to blog. Thus, a few notes: 1) Often the rate of change in a price can tell you something, particularly if the good in question is widely traded/held by a wide number of parties with different interests. In this…
I have often wondered whether the very low level of Private Residential Investment (also known as building houses) in the USA is due to unusually low expectations of long term increases in home prices. Here, I add that I would guess that the change was and end of the belief that the relative prices of…
Shares of Avanir Pharmaceuticals (AVNR) popped as much as 12% in pre-market trading today after Otsuka Pharmaceuticals (OTSKF) announced that it will pay $3.5 billion to acquire the company, $17 per share. The boards of both companies have approved the deal and the official tender offer for all outstanding shares will be out within 10…
With a market capitalization of around $16 trillion, the NYSE Composite Index is a massively broad equity indicator less affected by the day to day gyrations of AAPL, TSLA, BABA, or NFLX. As NewEdge’s Brad Wishak remarks, the world’s largest market cap equity index is painting a very different picture than that of the Dow or…
Lots of interesting chart levels today: As you can see from our Big Chart, the damage has been done over the past week as the Russell has once again failed at the Must Hold line, as has the NYSE and now we’re watching 17,600 very closely on both the Dow and the Nikkei (which we’re shorting…
Private nonfarm payrolls in the US are projected to increase 227,000 (seasonally adjusted) in tomorrow’s November update of the ADP Employment Report, based on The Capital Spectator’s median point forecast for several econometric estimates. The median projection is marginally below October’s increase. Compared with a pair of consensus estimates based on recent surveys of economists,…
The difficulties faced by the Japanese government and the Bank of Japan in restoring the economy to full health have not gone unnoticed by the world’s major credit rating agencies with Moody’s recently downgrading the country’s sovereign debt rating from AA3 to A1 and assigning Japanese debt with a “stable” outlook. That led to the…
One of the nice things about ETFs is the broad diversity they offer in terms of exposure to a vast variety of stock sectors within the US — but they also have exposure to a growing number of international countries (and in some cases, multiple choices within a single country or region), commodities, currencies, volatility,…
“Stocks are not always worth what they sell for. Sometimes they are carried too high, sometimes too low, by mass excitement. Sooner or later, though, they move into line with value.” Arnold Bernhard I have met many financially secure families over the years. Most earned this financial security by working hard, while saving as much…
