Photo Credit: Rob Pym This is another Aleph Blog series of indeterminate length. I won’t bleed as much as my friend James Altucher, but I will reveal the worst investments of my life. There have been a lot of them. Good investments have more than paid for the losses, but the losses were significant in two ways:…
A version of this post appeared in the San Antonio Express News. I’m fired up by the new US policy I’m totally fired up that the Obama administration relaxed travel, trade, and diplomatic restrictions on Cuba last week. Removing the US embargo will not raise up Cuban people’s lives as much as we hope without the…
The US dollar is narrowly mixed. The euro is pinned in a quarter cent range above $1.2220. The dollar is higher against the yen for the fifth consecutive session. It may be the first session since December 8 that the dollar spend the entire session above JPY120. The Australian dollar and sterling are the weakest of…
Gold, the ultimate inflation hedge, isn’t much use to investors these days. Oil is in a bear-market freefall that began in June, spearheading the longest commodity slump in at least a generation. The collapse means that instead of the surge in consumer prices that gold buyers have been expecting for much of the past decade, the…
Click on picture to enlarge As the year is coming to an end and the Dow is near all-time high levels, I wanted to take a peak at two different long-term perspectives. One of them Fibonacci Extension levels and the other a long-term Mega phone pattern. If one applies Fibonacci to the lowest “monthly closing…
“Predictions Are Difficult…Especially When They Are About The Future” – Niels Bohr We can’t predict the future – if it were possible fortune tellers would all win the lottery. They don’t, we can’t and we aren’t going to try to. However, we can analyze what has happened in the past, weed through the noise of the…
The mainstream economics narrative is so far down the monetary rabbit hole that the blinding clarity of the chart below has no chance whatsoever of seeing the light of day. That’s because it dramatizes the real truth regarding all the Fed gibberish about “accommodation” and “stimulus”. Namely, that what lies beneath its “extraordinary measures”, such as ZIRP, QE, wealth effects and the rest of…
In addition to all of our wars in the Middle East and the war that has erupted on the streets of America, we are now engaged in a cyber war with North Korea and an economic war with Russia. Without a doubt, the United States has the capability to do a tremendous amount of damage to…
In a normal economic times falling energy costs would be considered unadulterated good news. The facts are simple. No one buys a barrel of oil to display above the mantle. No one derives happiness from a lump of coal. Energy is simply a means to do or get the things that we want. We use…
Just a few days ago, president Obama made the farcical claim Putin Hasn’t ‘Rolled Me,’ Economic Sanctions on Russia Have Worked. In an interview with CNN, the president said economic sanctions on Moscow are working, crediting the American-led effort with a downturn in Russia’s economy and the decline of its currency. Even though Russia has…
