A few years ago I spent a good deal of time overseas. When you travel for an extended period, it is always interesting to begin to understand the perception that people in other parts of the world have about where you come from. When I was living and working in Spain, it was a common…
Chicago Fed’s Charlie Evans appears to have decided to flex his voting member status, Bullard-ness this evening. Speaking during a forum in Chicago, after The FOMC Minutes showed data-dependence was the thing… Evans exclaimed “raising rates would be a catastrophe,” and that “housing hasn’t shown the strength he’d like to see,” prompting S&P futures – with the help…
December was a solid month for American automakers. General Motors Company (GM) had its best December sales month since 2007, with sales up 19.3% over last year. Full-year sales were up a respectable 5.3%. Ford Motor Company (F) had its best December since 2005, though its full-year growth numbers were actually down slightly due to, among other things, retooling to make way…
After five days of selling, markets managed to bounce a bit today. Yesterday, stocks plunged mid-morning, sending SPX down to test 2000. Soon after, buyers started to trickle in. Taking a look at the indices and the sector ETFs, we see that financials and biotechs led the market bounce: XLF (financial) was up +1.05%, while…
ProShares – best known for its leveraged and inverse ETF lineup – has recently announced that it will close and liquidate 17 ETFs. The issuer currently has roughly 150 products listed in the U.S. markets spread across various categories such as Inverse Bonds, Inverse Equities, Currency, Financials Equities, Hedge Fund, Volatility and Leveraged Commodities. The…
The economic outlook for the United States in 2015 looks solid, though longer term forecasts must wrestle with the question of when the next recession will occur. A downturn is likely to come from an error by the Federal Reserve, as I explained in “The Next Recession: Cause and Timing.” However, 2015 is safe, because…
The Chart of the Day belongs to National Health Investors (NYSE:NHI). I found the REIT by sorting the All Time New High list for the stocks having the most frequent new highs in the last month, then used the Flipchart feature to review the charts. Since the Trend Spotter signaled a buy on 10/16 the…
Is the world’s biggest hedge fund going all-in on HFT and Dark Pools? We ask because Ray Dalio’s Westport, CT-based Bridgewater, which at last check manages around $160 billion between its Pure Alpha and All Weather fund products, and which according to preliminary data had a solid performance in 2014, has just hired Jose Marques,…
The global IPO market enjoyed a boom in 2014, with 40% more companies going public and raising a total of $249 billion. While global issues such as turmoil in Russia and conflict in the Middle East unnerved investors for the whole of the year, they kept on clamoring for new stocks with high growth potential…
In today’s NYT, Peter Eavis writes about the message in “soaring bond prices”: …a huge bond market with a strong track record for predicting economic problems is flashing a warning sign right now. … The prices of Treasury bonds are rallying fiercely. Source: message in “soaring bond prices”. Over the longer term, the nominal yield…
