Something strange started happening at the beginning of 2018. For the first time in a long time, investors started asking us what we thought about commodities. For the past several years, any time we talked about commodities, it felt like we were banging our heads against a wall. Investors were disinterested, and who could blame…
The Census Bureau’s Advance Retail Sales Report for March was released this morning. Headline sales came in at 0.6% month-over-month to one decimal and was above the Investing.com consensus of 0.4%. Core sales (ex Autos) came in at 0.2% MoM. January and February figures were revised. Here is the introduction from today’s report: Advance estimates of U.S….
Back in the olden days prior to 2008, it used to be against the rules to convert funds directly from a 401(k) plan (or other CODA plan, like a 403(b)) to a Roth IRA. At that time, you were required to do the “conversion two-step” wherein you would first rollover or direct-transfer your funds from…
Oil refiners are riskier than the market but … With the equity market wobbling, investors have been finding refuge, er, returns in an unlikely quarter – the oil sector. No, not integrated behemoths like ExxonMobil Corp. (NYSE: XOM) but independent refiners such as Valero Energy Corp. (NYSE: VLO). Over the last 12 months, refiners have outdone the S&P 500 Composite…
Shares of Merck (MRK) are rising this morning, while peer Bristol-Myers (BMY) is sliding, after both companies presented new data on their respective cancer immunotherapy treatments at the American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting that began over this weekend. MERCK’S KEYTRUDA: In conjunction with the AACR meeting, Merck announced results from KEYNOTE-189, a pivotal…
EURUSD Non-Commercials increased their net long positions in the Euro last night buying a further 13k contracts to take the total position to 147k contracts. EUR long positioning is now back up to its highest levels of the year as the market readies itself for ECB monetary policy normalization. Recent data has caused some market players…
The U.S. stock market indexes lost between 0.3% and 0.5% on Friday, following higher opening of the trading session, as investors were worried about Syrian conflict escalation. The S&P 500 index retraced some of last week’s uptrend and it currently trades 7.5% below its January 26 record high of 2,872.87. Both, Dow Jones Industrial Average gained and…
Back in the drug-soaked, if not halcyon, days known at the sexual and drug revolution—the 1960’s—many people were on a quest for the “perfect trip”, and the “perfect hit of acid” (the drug lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD). We will no doubt generate some hate mail for saying this, but we don’t believe that anyone ever…
I interviewed the CEO of Fortinet Ken Xie way back in 2010, a year after it went public. Ken had also co-founded NetScreen, which was acquired by Juniper for $4 billion stock in 2004 when it had revenue of $200 million. Both companies bootstrapped first and raised money later. Today, Fortinet (Nasdaq: FTNT) is a global…
The EUR/USD holds onto its gains after the US released a mixed bag of Retail Sales data Headline sales rose by 0.6%, better than expected, but the Control Group was not that great. The US Dollar was on the back foot ahead of the publication and the picture has not changed. US Retail Sales rose…
