With every positive invention, scams invented by unscrupulous operators follow. Here is a story about how one scam came across my desk for two different clients in the same week! The first case: A new client was referred to me. The task was to assist in a transaction where a Kuwaiti company was going to…
How Did the Stock Market Do Today? Dow Jones: 16,014.38; -12.67; -0.08% S&P 500: 1,852.21; -1.23; -0.07% Nasdaq: 4,268.76; -14.99; -0.35% The Dow Jones Industrial Average today (Tuesday) lost 12 points as oil prices fell again on supply concerns and traders prepared for U.S. Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen’s appearance before Congress on Wednesday. The markets received a late-session boost from biotech stocks after the Nasdaq…
There’s something worse than giving up at the bottom… There’s something worse than watching prices fall as you continue to add on the way down… It’s giving up “three feet from gold,” when if you had just stuck it out a bit longer, things might have turned your way. This tendency is part and parcel…
In what will undoubtedly shape up as the year of Financial Unicorns, Pinterest is among the most likely IPO candidates. Investors should keep close watch on the company, which has an $11 billion valuation Pinterest’s big advantage in the social media space is its potential for monetizing non-intrusive advertising. The company offers great content and allows users to seamlessly discover and…
With the “generals” finally meeting their reality-maker, investors appear to be questioning the DotCom bubble-like highs as momentum collapses. “Exuberance has turned to panic pretty quickly,” notes one asset manager and after a very rapid plunge in recent days, options traders are piling into protection at a pace not seen since Q4 2008. The Nasdaq-S&P implied…
With the S&P 500 down by 9% on the year by February 10th, we’re off to the worst start since the recessionary year of 2008 (at least on the Gregorian calendar); it’s too early to tell for the Lunar New Year. If there was any hint of over-optimism on the part of investors heading into…
What is “the gold standard?” Many readers would consider this a simple question and perhaps even an obsolete one. It is for precisely this reason that a mere definition is inadequate as an answer. A definition conveys no understanding and thus does nothing to eliminate the many misconceptions surrounding this concept. In order to provide…
The story of the post-crisis economic period is simple: The housing boom left the household sector mired in a deep debt hole. This was further exacerbated by the leverage Wall Street added on top of the household sector’s debt. This left the banks and household sector needing a great deal of support. Since 2008 we’ve…
The Stock market is at do or die support. With the S&P 500 right at do-or-die support per this chart (absolutely critical, but not particularly strong support), I have done more flattening out after yesterday’s post noting a short cover of GS and a sale of TLT, each very profitable positions. I just don’t think it’s…
Before the US market opened, Japan’s Nikkei had posted a -5.40% plunge for the day. The Nikkei is in a bear market, down 22.9% from its interim high in late June of last year, and it has taken a dive of 8.2% since its central bank announced its negative interest on January 29th. And today…
