With the market looking wobbly this December, the need to get paid in cold, hard cash has never been more apparent. If you are already in retirement, selling portfolio positions in a declining market to meet your living expenses is, for lack of better word, scary. Living off of dividend and interest income makes for…
‘If you are a fiduciary, the decision is easy.’ Especially if you take the duties of a fiduciary for other people’s assets seriously. What about the fiduciary responsibilities of central banks? Hard to say, right? We’ll get right on that– in about seven years. Jawohl! And no need for an audit. We believe. And as…
The solutions organized by the superpower become the dominant global system because they are far more effective, efficient, flexible and sustainable than the solutions organized by other nations and trading blocs. There’s a popular geopolitical parlor game called Who will be the next superpower? While the game excels at triggering a mind-fogging tsunami of nationalistic emotions,…
At present, almost all major world economies are heading toward globalization and trade liberalization. Escalation in the domestic and national product levels in each country is driven by the respective industrial growth rate. Economic development of a country is directly related to its comprehensive energy supply. Oil comprises nearly 40% of the global energy consumption,…
“Most Shorted” stocks are up 4.75% from yesterday’s lows – the biggest squeeze since October 2011. Sending Small Caps up 4.5%… This squeeze has entirely decoupled US equities from VIX… from credit… and from crude oil… But when did any of that matter… Charts: Bloomberg
In a previous post we introduced our new investment strategy, the BUG. There has been a lot of interest but also some concerns when it comes to using leverage. We are introducing a version of the BUG for non-leveraged accounts. Here are the statistics for the backtest for the last 5 years. Strategy Return MaxDD…
The Philly Fed Business Outlook Survey growth declined but remains well into expansion territory for the tenth month in a row. Key elements remain in expansion. This is a very noisy index which readers should be reminded is sentiment based. The Philly Fed historically is one of the more negative of all the Fed manufacturing…
The following is an excerpt from this week’s Earnings Trends Report, to see the full article, please click here. Handicapping the Q4 Earnings Season The December quarter hasn’t ended yet, but the Q4 earnings season has gotten underway already. The reason for that is that we count companies with fiscal quarters ending in November as…
“Any investor or analyst of any world commodity must be able to account for and rationalize a 9% price move in less than two trading days; otherwise he or she couldn’t possibly understand the dynamics of that commodity. Yet I received virtually no requests to explain the price drop. The facts are clear – the…
Wednesday, just two days ahead of BlackBerry’s Friday morning third quarter earnings announcement, CEO John Chen unveiled the company’s latest handset. Under Chen’s leadership BlackBerry has gotten its loses under control, now the company just needs to start making money again. Here are 3 reasons why BlackBerry could turn things around next year. 1….
