As we approach the year’s end, I want to look at an important trend that could revolutionize our lives in 2015. I’m talking about Bitcoin (BITCOMP), the groundbreaking digital currency. You see, as it matures and heads toward wider acceptance, Bitcoin will unleash gale force winds on the financial services industry and its regulatory protector,…
This Great Graphic, from Bloomberg, depicts the performance of three global equity benchmarks indexed to the start of the year. Click on picture to enlarge The green line is MSCI Emerging Market equity index. It had been doing well until early September. It has been crushed since. The case for emerging markets was predicated on a…
Help, I’m getting a nosebleed! Like a roller-coaster that takes you higher and higher, it’s fun to anticipate the drop ahead but now we’re running out of oxygen at these levels (and yes, we’re shorting again) as the Russell challenges 1,200 again and the Dow, S&P and Nasdaq come close to their highs yet again. Click on…
CLICK ON CHART TO ENLARGE If one likes the idea of buying low and selling higher, junk bonds might come to mind due to how hard they’ve been hit of late! The chart below highlights that an unusual and large performance spread between JNK and the S&P 500. Its not often that these…
It’s all about real estate investment trusts (REITs) these days when it comes to bullish performance among the major asset classes via our standard list of ETF proxies for the key slices of global markets. US REITs, to be precise, are enjoying a melt-up moment. But don’t confuse the stellar results with foreign REITs, which are posting…
Turbulence and volatility are in Steven Salz’s forecast for the energy market. The special situations analyst at M Partners tells The Energy Report that falling oil prices are hurting oilfield services companies in different measures depending on their specialties, but that all are taking hits. A sign of the times: He thinks the Halliburton/Baker Hughes merger may…
Sungarden Investment Research Article of the Week by Rob Isbitts, Sungarden Investment Research For a while now, my firm and I have been devout in alerting our clients and blog subscribers to the issues that will confront them as investors if/when the more than three decades of generally falling U.S. interest rates reverses itself. But what…
OVERNIGHT MARKETS AND NEWS March E-mini S&Ps (ESH15 +0.24%) this morning are up +0.29% at a contract high, while European stocks are down -0.91% as a slide in health-care companies leads the overall market lower. The Russian ruble strengthened to just below 60 per dollar on signs of a short-term cash crunch as the Bank of Russia provided…
Deere & Company (DE) was founded in 1837 and has not reduced its dividend payments since 1987. The company sells agricultural, construction, and forestry equipment globally under the John Deere name. The company is a member of the Dividend Achievers Index, a select group of stocks that have increased their dividend payments for 10 or more…
Yesterday, when we reported the latest rumor of Russian gold selling, this time out of SocGen, we said that “it should be noted that SocGen and its “sources” have a conflict: in an indirect way, none other than SocGen is suddenly very interested in Russia stabilizing its economy because as we wrote before, “Russia Contagion Spreads To European…
