Gold prices ended Monday’s session down 0.9%, or $10.85, to settle at $1183.20 an ounce. Investors turned to the relative safety of the U.S. dollar after Greece’s parliament failed to elect a new president for the country, paving the way for an early general election next month. The XAU/USD pair has tried to break below the…
Nasdaq 5,000! There’s a level we haven’t seen since the Dot-Com days. After 15 years, we’re back over 4,800 for the first time and it would be a real shame to fly so close to the sun without getting a chance to melt our feathers at 5,000 once again, wouldn’t it? While I doubt we’ll…
EMC Corporation (EMC) is our hot stock of the week and earns an Attractive rating. EMC develops and supports information infrastructure and virtual infrastructure technologies. Over the past five years, EMC has grown after-tax profit (NOPAT) by 18% compounded annually. Over the same time frame, the company has increased its return on invested capital (ROIC) from 12% to…
You will have to forgive me for a very short post because: (a) I am usually spoiled to have Jack to a nice long post in the morning, (b) my fingers are ice-cold from my pre-dawn dog walk, and I can barely type. Anyway, as delighted as I am to see gold’s strength, I would…
The non-seasonally adjusted Case-Shiller home price index (20 cities) for October 2014 (released today) year-over-year rate of home price growth slowed from 4.8% (reported as 4.9% last month) to 4.5%. 20 city unadjusted home price rate of growth decelerated 0.3% month-over-month. [Econintersect uses the change in year-over-year growth from month-to-month to calculate the change in rate of growth] Case-Shiller no…
Written by Gary Premarkets were down 0.4% at one point with pundits pointing to various reasons, none of which made any sense. Markets opened down 0.2% and traded sideways for the first 15 minutes. By 10 am the averages were trending down on spurts of heavy red volume, but ultimate session direction remains in doubt. Our…
The Santa Claus rally, coined by The Stock Trader’s Almanac, is the performance of the S&P500 in the “last 5 trading days of the year AND the first two of the New Year.” That means this year it is the performance from the close on 12/23. This morning’s USDJPY-driven (home-prices helped) weakness has sent the Dow and…
There are many things behind the decline in the euro that pushed from $1.40 in early May to fresh two-year lows yesterday. Chief among those reasons, we posit, is the diverging trajectory of monetary policy. The Great Graphic, created on Bloomberg, shows the euro-dollar exchange rate (yellow line) and the discount Germany pays under the US to…
See how long the S&P 500 has historically taken to revert to fair value Te stock market appears to be overvalued by more than 20% One data-driven formula that determines whether you should buy now or wait for a better price The S&P 500 is currently trading at a P/E ratio of 20.28. The long-term…
Readers often ask me if now is a good time to buy a house. This question has appeared in my inbox for the past nine years, as the Housing Bubble reached its climax, burst, and an Echo Bubble arose in its place. It’s a tough question, as you know, for reasons that are inherent to buying…
