Housing construction continues to slow in 2017, dragged down by fewer multi-family projects. Total permits and starts have essentially flatlined since 2015, a further slowdown from one already slowdown. The single-family market is still growing but at a historically tepid pace, leaving the pace of construction overall to be dictated by weakness in apartment development….
The gold industry has been built on the leveraging of debt and energy. The days of using human and animal labor to produce the precious yellow metal are long gone. While some gold is still mined the old fashion way, the overwhelming majority is produced by using colossal-sized mining equipment, massive amounts of capital, energy,…
I caught an interesting exchange on Twitter between old friend Mark Yusko and Lance Roberts as follows; This conversation gets to the heart of one of the major themes of this blog going back to the beginning. Indexing, where the context is buying passive funds and holding on no matter what, is, of course, valid…
Bitcoin plunged suddenly on Wednesday after the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission claimed jurisdiction over bitcoin derivatives. It’s only the latest whiff of regulation, and apparently those who invest in the cryptocurrency can’t handle it. However, some are calling this bitcoin price drop a healthy one because of how high it climbed in such a short amount of…
The U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development have now published their findings for September new residential building permits. The latest reading of 1.215M was a decrease from 1.272M in August and above the Investing.com forecast of 1.245M. Here is the opening of this morning’s monthly report: Building Permits Privately-owned housing units authorized…
Again today we saw natural gas prices come under heavy selling pressure as longer-range forecasts eliminated the heating demand that we see in the medium-term forecast. The result was a break below one of our near-term support levels at $2.88 which opens up room for a re-test of $2.83. One easy way to see the…
PITTSBURGH–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Alcoa Corporation (NYSE: AA): 3Q 2017 Results1 Net income of $113 million, or $0.60 per share Excluding special items, adjusted net income of $135 million, or $0.72 per share $561 million of adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) excluding special items, up 16 percent sequentially, on improved aluminum pricing and higher…
Yes, it’s another glaring case of “revolving door” cronyism between Wall Street and the SEC: on Wednesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced it had hired Brett Redfearn, a JPMorgan banker, to head the agency’s Division of Trading and Markets, arguably the most important group within the SEC, one which oversees U.S. stock markets and…
Shares of Chipotle Mexican Grill (CMG) are sliding after Bank of America Merrill Lynch analyst Gregory Francort downgraded the stock to Underperform, a sell-equivalent rating, on labor costs concerns. The analyst argued that while the struggling restaurant chain has done a “very strong job” managing labor in a tough sales backdrop, it will have trouble…
Twitter (TWTR) CEO Jack Dorsey takes a lot of heat for the company’s weak performance, especially since he’s juggling the running of two multi-billion dollar companies at the same time. Along with running Twitter, Dorsey is the CEO of Square (SQ) as well. But you don’t hear people talk about how well Square is doing…
