Let’s consider some examples of potential asymmetric-warfare tactics as they relate to the price of oil. The world has habituated to the never-ending undeclared war over ownership and access to hydrocarbons. Now we are entering a new phase of asymmetric war being waged not over oil but the price of oil. Many observers see a parallel in Saudi Arabia’s…
In spite of the cold snap of Q1, the U.S. equity markets managed to deliver handsome returns last year. 2014 turned out to be the third consecutive year of double-digit percentage gains for the first time in more than two decades. Not only did the markets manage to withstand the harsh winter weather during the…
Obamacare was craftily written… Benefits come first, and then the bite comes later. You see, if you remained uninsured in 2014, you would have paid a penalty of $95 (or 1% above the filing threshold). But the fines were structured to increase over time. And 2015 is the year that average citizens will really start to feel…
Obamacare was craftily written… Benefits come first, and then the bite comes later. You see, if you remained uninsured in 2014, you would have paid a penalty of $95 (or 1% above the filing threshold). But the fines were structured to increase over time. And 2015 is the year that average citizens will really start to feel…
January 07, 2015 08:45 AM Eastern Standard Time HIGHLAND PARK, N.J.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–TalkMarkets, the first new financial-information website to reach critical mass in recent years, just celebrated a milestone. Only six months into beta, TalkMarkets.com, founded by Boaz Berkowitz, formerly of Bloomberg and Seeking Alpha, reached its one millionth pageview in early December and is tracking…
Presented with absolutely no biased, judgmental, cognitively dissonant comments at all… Chart: Bloomberg
The 2014 Q4 earnings season takes center stage next week with Alcoa’s (AA – Analyst Report) release after the close on Monday. Alcoa isn’t the overall first to report Q4 results, though it is the first S&P 500 member with a fiscal calendar quarter to come out with results. Companies with fiscal quarters ending in…
Having helped people with problem debt since 1994 and having lived through financial problems myself in the late 1980s, I’m always amazed how badly people manage the art of getting out of debt. When I listen to “the debt experts” it almost seems they have never lived through really bad debt problems since they miss…
The stock market has now given back almost all of its late-December gains and it looks like it’s finally starting to pay attention to the canary in the coal mine that is the junk bond market. As I pointed out about a month ago, the divergence between stocks and junk bond spreads (see the chart in…
Sam Ro at Business Insider recently posted “The Most Bullish Chart Your See Has A Big Stock Market Crash In The Middle Of It” in which he makes a very interesting statement: “More and more Wall Street strategists argue we should think about stocks as being in the middle phase of a long-term, multiyear, secular…
