Earlier, we reported that various currency brokers such as FXCM and FxPro, would – as a result of the soaring liquidity in the USDRUB pair – suspend trading in the Russian Ruble (while other merely hiked margins to ridiculous levels). It appears things have escalated again, and as FXCM just reported, instead of just politely advising clients…
Don’t believe everything you read in the mainstream media. Especially don’t believe anything in the financial news media until you’ve looked at the data yourself. It’s no wonder investors are so often caught flatfooted in the markets. Financial “journalists” feed their readers and viewers a constant stream of misinformation and bad data. Financial reporters are so atrocious…
To say that gold is in a bear market is to misunderstand both gold and markets. Gold isn’t an investment that goes up and down. It is money in the most basic store-of-value sense. Most of the time it just sits there, and when its price changes in local currency terms that says more about…
Today’s US economic releases – housing starts and business survey data for the manufacturing sector – suggest that the macro headwinds are increasing. It’s premature to dismiss the numbers du jour, but the previously released reports in recent weeks – payrolls, retail sales, and industrial production – offer a sharply positive counterpoint. For the moment,…
Residential building permits were not good. Even construction completions outnumbered permits (showing that the future is darkening as there will be less homes to build). All data is decelerating. The unadjusted rate of annual growth for building permits in the last 12 months has declined from a channel between 25% and 40% to now contraction…
Dividend Discount Value of the DJII at Record Level, Almost Double its Price. Yesterday was a major tax payment date for U.S. companies. For the rest of the year the U.S. Treasury will be out of the market. The Santa Clause Rally can now get underway with particular vitality as there is a high probability…
LG plans to unveil a TV based on quantum-dot technology at CES 2015. Quantum dots use crystals only a couple of dozen atoms thick to produce more accurate color. A new kind of display is about to make TV images appear even more lifelike. LG will show off a TV based on quantum-dot technology at CES 2015…
Based on an old reliable oil/silver ratio the price of silver should be more than twice as high as it is today, a bit more than $50 per ounce. During times of a more ‘physical economy’ versus the ‘paper economy’ we have now, oil and silver had a strong bond. What many people don’t know…
These are tense moments… At 1 am in the morning, Russia made a dramatic announcement to raise its base interest rate from 10.5% to 17%. Their ruble was falling fast yesterday. There is capital flight out of Russia. So the rate rise was meant to attract money back into their country. They even raised their…
Remember the ‘Peak Oil’ hype that was promoted far and wide as trend followers disguised as financial analysts exalted the likes of T Boone Pickens, Jim Rogers and a host of commodity/resource gurus? Websites sprung up far and wide seizing this opportunity to promote a viewpoint that was flat out wrong. There was no ‘Peak…
