Short Commodities? Stay Away From Leverage

So, you wanna be a commodity bear? Well, there’s certainly good reason. This year, the equal-weighted Thomson Reuters-CRB Commodity Index has fallen 7.5 percent. Other commodity benchmarks, more heavily skewed to the energy sector, have slumped even more. The Bloomberg Commodity index, mirrored by the iPath Bloomberg Commodity Index Total Return ETN (NYSE Arca: DJP), for…

Big Blue Takes A Big Dump

IBM is one of the 105 (and growing) short positions I have cooking. I have been waiting for it to break beneath its dinky little range for weeks, and voila, it finally happened today. Let the games begin. (If there’s any curiosity, my long positions total zero).  

The Glass Is Half Full……And Filling Up

“Davidson” submits: 1)  If one studies markets using the historical record, the most striking feature revealed is that fundamental economic trends correlate with the long term trends in equity prices. 2)  If one examines multiple measures of economic activity, they correlate with each other and let one make good guesses as to future changes in…

EC I Just Got

Summary: “Greatness isn’t just talent. It’s talent applied consistently.” Gary Player. Ventas, Inc. declared its quarterly common dividend of $.79 per share, a 9% increase from the prior dividend of $.725 per share. I would wait for a 10% sell-off or a price of $66.00 that represents a 4.5% dividend yield (based on the new…

SPY Updated

Frankly, the more unwieldy this hyper frenetic market gets, the less inclination I have to do NFTRH+ updates, because the volatility has a funny way of breaking charts (with associated mixed results for +). We are not participating in a stable market my friends. But insofar as a low risk setup comes along, so be…

E

Bill McDermott, the CEO of SAP is making the news…for all the right reasons.  Bill believes that trust is the ULTIMATE career weapon, and unlike most of his colleagues Bill is willing to talk about it. I recently wrote two articles, the first called CEOs “Suck” at Trust and the second, Trust, Governance & Howard Schultz….

Identiv Goes On The Record With Disney Infinity Toys

On Thursday December 11th,  Identiv (INVE) revealed that it is indeed supplying NFC technology for Disney’s (DIS) Infinity line of toys. We have mentioned this several times in the past, but the company’s CFO, Brian Nelson, admitted this fact on December 11.  We have provided his audio presentation here in its entirety accompanied by the investor slide show….

Producer Price Index: Inflation Remains Tame

Today’s release of the November Producer Price Index (PPI) for Final Demand came in at -0.2% month-over-month seasonally adjusted. That’s down from the previous month’s 0.2% increase. Core Final Demand (less food and energy) was unchanged from last month. The year-over-year change in Final Demand is up 1.4%, the lowest since 1.2% in February. Here…