Shares of Xoma (XOMA) are trading down 77% at Wednesday’s close after reporting failed results of its phase 3 trial in patients with Behcet’s disease Uveitis — a rare eye disease. The phase 3 trial is known as the EYEGUARD-B trial run by a French Pharmaceutical company known as Servier. Patients in the study were…
“Behold, the pay of the laborers who have worked your fields, and which has been withheld by you, cries out against you; and the suffering of those who have done the harvesting has reached the ears of the Lord of hosts.” James 5:4 July and August are certainly not traditional months in which to see…
Uncle Buck popped above key resistance at 98 the other day and unsurprisingly turned down. The thing is though, he made a higher high and at least theoretically keeps a fledgling uptrend intact. It is more important at this point to get the higher high than it was to hold it for the short-term. I…
I’m starting to see signs that market participants are abandoning their losers and pressing their shorts. When this occurs near all time highs it often means some pain is ahead for the major indexes. Here are some charts that serve as examples. First is NYSE New Highs / Lows. New lows have now risen above…
As the NYMEX close approached, front-month WTI Crude futures slumped towards a $48 handle – the lowest since early March, having firmly rejected the algo-driven rip after this morning’s inventory build and tiny production cut… Charts: Bloomberg
This morning’s release of the June Existing-Home Sales shows the highest sales in eight years to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.49 million units from a slight downward revision of 5.32 million in May (previously 5.35 million). The Investing.com consensus was for 5.40 million. The latest number represents a 3.2% increase from the previous month and…
From mid-2012 until the beginning of 2014, US treasuries were in a steep decline (yield rising) in expectations of Fed rate hikes that never came. 2014 was a great year for treasury bulls, undoing the carnage of the previous year and then some. 30-year treasuries hit a record low yield. So far, 2015 has been…
I have been suggesting for quite some time that the Federal Reserve is stuck in a “liquidity trap” which makes it very difficult for monetary policy to be effective. More importantly, beginning in January of this year, I have suggested that the Fed is being forced to choose between the “lesser of two evils,” to wit: “The real concern…
I realized that our mentally-challenged, differently-abled bullish friends will refuse to accept it for a long, long time, but their welfare-sponsored bull-run ended last December. The breakdown has been subtle since then, and the Silicon Valley stocks that are keeping my house valued at preposterous levels just keep shooting higher (GOOGL, etc.) But the cold…
In an excellent (and free!) daily email I receive, the Daily Shot, I ran across a chart that touched off my quant BS alert. This chart is from here, and is obviously a few years out-of-date, but that isn’t the problem. The problem is that the chart suggests that gold prices rise 5.5% every year. If you…
