Managers need to understand how their business is doing, but normal seasonal variations make this harder. Here’s a basic primer that every business leader needs to understand before looking at data about sales, operations or finance. The Christmas season is a great example of seasonality: it occurs regularly and has a colossal impact on many…
The Ruble is collapsing. This will do dramatic damage to the Russian economy, because many Russian firms have dollar denominated debts. This is a familiar story. Something similar happened in East Asian countries in 1997 and Russia in 1998. There is no good policy response, because defense of the Ruble based on extremely high interest…
Gold prices closed slightly higher on Tuesday after falling 2.5% the session before. The XAU/USD pair initially tried to rally, at one point even managed to climbed above the $1212 level and tested the resistance at $1221. However, as can be seen on the daily chart, sellers stepped in and prices retreated all the way…
(T2108 measures the percentage of stocks trading above their respective 40-day moving averages [DMAs]. It helps to identify extremes in market sentiment that are likely to reverse. To learn more about it, see my T2108 Resource Page. You can follow real-time T2108 commentary on twitter using the #T2108 hashtag. T2108-related trades and other trades are sometimes posted on…
Last week Iron Mountain (NYSE:IRM) said that the registration statement of Iron Mountain REIT Inc. was declared effective. As a result, a special meeting of the company’s stockholders will be held Jan. 20, 2015, at which stockholders will consider and vote on a proposal to adopt the plan of merger between the company and Iron Mountain REIT, among other…
I’ve been writing for a while now that the disappointing Black Friday sales didn’t tell the whole story. Yes, Black Friday sales were down by 11%, but the holiday discounting started weeks earlier this year and, frankly, the novelty appeal of Black Friday has worn off after six years of increasingly aggressive promotion. I’m concerned…
AT&T, Inc.’s (T – Analyst Report) wireless churn rate may increase in the upcoming quarter compared to the year-ago period. However, the company is likely to witness strong momentum in both its Wireline and Wireless businesses in the long run. Continued strength in the smartphone business owing to the mobile share plan is driving AT&T’s…
We have two reports in our El Buen Fin Series, starting with my favorite yield play. People seeking high yields should buy foreign bank preferred shares, issued at $25 per share, NYSE-traded, and relatively liquid, a special class of American depository receipts. You should buy despite or rather because of the black label warning. The label reads…
Let’s see. Between July 2007 and January 2009, the median US residential housing price plunged from $230k to $165k or by 30%. That must have been some kind of super “tax cut”. In fact, that brutal housing price plunge amounted to a $400 billion per year “savings” at the $1.5 trillion per year run-rate of residential housing turnover. So with all that extra money…
As Zero Hedge first reported today, shortly before noon one FX broker (and subsequently more) advised clients that any existing Ruble positions would be forcibly closed out because “western banks have stopped pricing USDRUB“, over concerns of Russian capital controls. Ironically, it was this forced liquidation of mostly short RUB positions that pushed the RUB higher,…
