Prospect Capital Corporation (PSEC) got off to a rough start this month with a dividend cut. Prospect Capital cut its dividend to 8.33 cents per month from 11.1 cents. But even after the reduction, PSEC sports a dividend yield of 12.1%. Not bad. A 12% dividend is nothing to take lightly. Given that U.S. stocks are priced to…
Imagine walking into a store and the shop assistant walks over and says, “Hi Simona, here’s a cappuccino for you. It’s just the way you like it, with extra foam.” She consults her smart phone for a second and then says: “I know you put on two extra kilos over the holidays, but we have some…
The Financial Times ran a very interesting article last week called “China: Turning away from the dollar”. It got a lot of attention, at least among China analysts, and I was asked several times by friends and clients for my response. The authors, James Kynge and Josh Noble, begin their article by noting that we are going through significant…
At G20 last year, all governments agreed to report everyone everywhere to their host countries for tax purposes. The hunt for taxes is destroying the world economy at a staggering rapid pace and this is far worse than even I had anticipated when we first forecast BIG BANG would hit 2015.75 back in 1985….
On December 11, 2014, the U.S. House passed a bill repealing the Dodd-Frank requirement that risky derivatives be pushed into big-bank subsidiaries, leaving our deposits and pensions exposed to massive derivatives losses. The bill was vigorously challenged by Senator Elizabeth Warren; but the tide turned when Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorganChase, stepped into the ring….
In late 2006, default rates on lower-rate subprime private MBS began to rise considerably. Though not a very transparent market to the mainstream media-watching world, bankers knew trouble was brewing as this had not happened before in such a benign house price decline. Banks, knowing what they had on their books, what they had sold to others,…
Stocks have done exceptionally well over the last few years. But the scars of the 2008 crash are still making many investors question their long-held beliefs, including the virtues of ‘buy & hold’ investing. This shows up in weak money flows into equity mutual funds, which have yet to fully reverse despite the market’s strong…
The fundamental issue confronting investors is about supply and demand. In recent weeks, as energy prices and other industrial commodity prices fell, investors focused on supply. The stimulative effect of the fall in prices, and the likely policy response by some major central banks, such as the ECB, and possibly the BOJ. This was good…
The continuing resolution to fund the gov’t $1.1 trillion, the sum of the entire national debt under President Reagan in 1980, narrowly passed the House late Thursday by a 219-206 vote, with support from 57 Democrats. This was after a much turmoil amid fierce lobbying from the White House and Congressional leaders. That’s right. Obama…
by Rohini Grover and Ajay Shah A remarkable feature of options trading is that it reveals a forward-looking measure of the market’s view of future volatility. This was first done by CBOE in 1993 with the S&P 500 index options, with an information product named `VIX’ which reveals the market’s view of future volatility of…
