This has been a good year for volatility. If you like that kind of stuff, that is. It’s not that volatility has reached stratospheric levels; it’s just that it’s returned to a normal level. It wasn’t too long ago—think November—that the Cboe Volatility Index (CBOE: VIX) scraped a historic bottom at 9.14 percent. February changed all that….
Posted on April 12, 2018 by James Harte Gold: Geopolitical Concerns Fuel Safe Haven Demand Gold prices rallied this week as the market saw a strong influx in safe haven demand due to rising geopolitical uncertainty. The escalation in tensions between the US and China due to Trump’s protectionist import tariffs and Beijing’s subsequent reciprocation has been a key focal…
Shares of Lockheed Martin (LMT) are in focus after a report that the U.S. Department of Defense has again stopped accepting deliveries of the company’s F-35 jets. PENTAGON HALTS F-35 DELIVERIES: The Pentagon has stopped accepting most deliveries of F-35 jets from Lockheed Martin due to a fight over who will cover costs for fixing…
Here is a table showing the annualized change in Headline and Core CPI, not seasonally adjusted, for each of the past six months. Also included are the eight components of Headline CPI and a separate entry for Energy, which is a collection of sub-indexes in Housing and Transportation. We can make some inferences about how…
2018 hasn’t been the year for the little guy. Late last year, individual investors appeared to be finally getting comfortable with stocks as bullish sentiment in the weekly poll from AAII topped 50% for the first time in nearly three years. For a little while, they enjoyed the ride as equities surged to start the year and…
Being part of Thrivent Financial, Thrivent Mutual Funds had $136 billion worth of assets under management as of Dec 31, 2017. It has invested in 23 mutual funds across a wide range of categories including equity, income plus, asset allocation and fixed income funds. Also, it serves more than two million customers and has at…
“Everyone” knows that the future of the US economy depends on a well-educated workforce, and on a growing share of students achieving higher levels of education. But state spending patterns on higher education aren’t backing up this belief. Here are some figures from the SHEF 2017: State Higher Education Finance report published last month by the State Higher…
I prior posts highlighting investor sentiment data it has been noted that sentiment data is more actionable at market bottoms than at market tops. Knowing this, the American Association of Individual Investors reported bullish investors sentiment at 26.1%, which is below the minus 1 standard deviation level of the average bullish sentiment level. Additionally, bearish sentiment…
Photo Credit: techmsg/Flickr.com Billion Dollar Unicorn Cloudera (NYSE: CLDR) listed in April last year. Many expected it to be a strong IPO, but the company has not done very well under public scrutiny. Recently, it reported its fourth-quarter results where the weak guidance sent the stock to its lowest levels since it listed. Cloudera’s Financials Revenues for the quarter…
In December of last year, as Congress voted to pass the “Tax Cut & Jobs Act,” I wrote that without “real and substantive cuts to spending,” the debt and deficits will begin to balloon. At that time, I mapped out the trajectory of the deficit based on the cuts to revenue from lower tax rates and sustained levels of government spending….
