Federal Reserve policymakers meet Tuesday and Wednesday to discuss when to raise interest rates and how they will communicate those intentions without upsetting financial markets or the economic recovery. Unfortunately, the Fed is constrained by its own past missteps, and its credibility is at stake. Short term rates have been near zero since 2008, and…
Top scoring weekly returns: Buy and Hold 1 Year The average score across our entire 1,600 stock universe is 65.16 this week. The best scoring sector is financials. Healthcare is the second highest scoring sector, followed by utilities. Consumer, industrials, services, and technology all post average scores higher than the average stock in our universe….
Source Some interesting news has reached us from Australia lately, as the Treasury department of Australia has released a big working paper investigating whether or not the capital ratios of its banks are sufficient. This 320 page paper is the outcome of an investigation ordered by Australia’s conservative government which was commissioned to generate potential…
If you mention oil or gas stocks to energy investors, you’re apt to get a big eye roll. Prices for commodities are plunging, and it takes a brave soul to venture out looking for bargains. With that said, there are several opportunities for you to consider right now – ones that many investors are overlooking…
Is this the start of the next major financial crisis? The nightmarish collapse of the price of oil is creating panic in financial markets all over the planet. On June 16th, U.S. oil was trading at a price of $107.52. Since then, it has fallen by almost 50 dollars in less than 6 months. This…
“I learned more about the economy from one South Dakota dust storm that I did in all my years of college.” – Hubert H. Humphrey About a month after the end of Quantitative Easing 1 in 2010, Treasuries began outperforming the stock market. By the time that leadership was over a few short months later,…
Stocks have needed a reason to take a breather and pull back in this long-standing ultra-bullish climate, with strong economic data and seasonality providing impressive tailwinds — and plummeting oil prices certainly have given it to them. But this minor pullback was fully expected and indeed desirable for market health. The future remains bright for…
West Texas Intermediate sold for $105 a barrel at the start of July, but ended last week at $58. The most important factor has been surging U.S. production. But another reason oil prices have slid so much is weakness in demand for the product, which may be related to a slowdown of overall world economic growth….
While the entire financial world is hanging on to every Mario Draghi word in hope Europe finally improves the market’s (if not the economy’s) “fundamentals” to new record highs, and joins the rest of the “developed” world’s central banks in injecting trillions of liquidity into the Div/0 P/E stocks “whatever it takes” (because in a…
So the markets are getting skittish and the media is obsessing about the many things that could go wrong out there. It’s like 2007 all over again, but with one big difference: Back then the mega-banks were reasonably sure the government would, if necessary, bail them out of their hundreds of trillions of dollars of…
