The end of Friday trading was certainly interesting as the last thirty minutes of the trading day incurred most of the day’s half of a percent loss. A few Twitter posts I read were comments in the vein of “this is the selling I have been anticipating.” The market is overdue for a pullback. Although the first day of January is simply another day on the calendar, much is made of the fact it is January and a new year. So what is to be expected from the equity market in 2018? I will admit that top of mind is the fact the S&P 500 Index has not had a double digit pullback since early 2016, nearly two years ago. The market wil...
It is appropriate to think of Keynesian economics as superficial economics*, because this school of thought generally considers what’s seen and ignores what’s unseen. To put it another way, Keynesianism focuses on the readily-observable situation and the immediate/direct effects of a policy while paying little or no attention to why the current situation came about and the indirect (not immediately obvious) consequences of a policy. This leads to nonsensical conclusions, such as that the economy can sometimes be helped by the destruction of wealth (the idea being that after assets are destroyed people can be ‘gainfully’ employed rebui...
GBPUSD: The pair closed higher the past week opening the door for more strength towards its resistance at 1.3549 zone. Support lies at the 1.3450 level where a break will turn attention to the 1.3400 level. Further down, support lies at the 1.3350 level. Below here will set the stage for more weakness towards the 1.3300 level. Conversely, resistance stands at the 1.3549 levels with a turn above here allowing more strength to build up towards the 1.3600 level. Further out, resistance resides at the 1.3650 level followed by the 1.3700 level. On the whole, GBPUSD looks to strengthen further....
If you want to know what’s swirling around the minds of the American population, just look at Google search trends. It’s all fun and games “buying the f***ing dip” until someone mentions “sell stocks.” Meanwhile, Americans panic-search “buy bitcoin.” The gig-economy as per “Craigslist jobs” has plateaued. Americans are now resorting to the “Wal-Mart credit card” in a period of wage stagnation. American search for “Goodwill near me” explodes, as their standard of living declines. Bottom line: The sad story of the new normal for many Americans is being told through their simple searches on Google. ...
The popularity of ETF investing is now sky-high and it took around only 20 years for this to happen. Though the pace of rollout slackened a bit in 2016 as we saw close to 240 launches compared with approximately 300 seen in 2015, the issuances gathered steam again in 2017. As many as 271 ETFs were launched till Dec 28 (read: Why ETFs Are Thriving in 2017). The last three years have been particularly eventful compared with about 180 ETF initiations in 2014, 150 in 2013 and 170 rollouts in 2012. All these have taken the tally to 2,113 ETFs so far. Not only this, a considerable number of ETFs are in the pipeline, pointing to growing investor i...
Happy New Year wishes. The final Congressional Budget Office (CBO) scoring of the tax bill was submitted to the House Ways and Means Committee on December 15. A summary of the scoring is available here in PDF form. Mike Englund of Action Economics had this to say about the CBO analysis: “The CBO Score of the new tax bill shows a bigger 2018–19 GDP fiscal boost than in the earlier Senate scoring. We expect year-end tax arbitrage, as corporations pull expenses into 2017, while individuals delay receipt of bonus income to Q1 and pre-pay January state tax in December. Asset sales will be delayed to Q1 given higher AMT limits (and no corporate...
I ended 2016 and started 2017 with a big focus on uranium stocks. This was because they were ripping out of a Stage 1 base on huge volume towards the end of 2016.Uranium stocks had been destroyed for the last 5 years so this had the potential to be a monster trade. The stocks did well for a few months and by taking some partial profits I made money on some of my uranium positions. But I also held onto a few uranium miners too long as the rally started to fizzle out in March and gave back some profits. I ended up moving on to other sectors as the uranium miners eventually broke down and went back into a Stage 1 base until the end of the year. ...
by RCM Alternatives We can’t believe 2017 is almost over. That means it’s time to look at the winners and losers of the past year. Since we specialize in most things deemed “alternative” in the investment space, here’s a look at the top 10 “Alternative ETFs” via ETF.com. As a disclaimer, we will say that most things labeled alternative are alternative in name only and don’t truly find returns unique to the rest of your portfolio. (Disclaimer: Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results) Source: ETF.com We knew VIX ETFs were all the rage in 2017; five of the 10 Top Alternative ETFs are short VIX products! ...
Alex here with this week’s Macro Musings. Articles I’m reading — Take 20 minutes and read Michael Mauboussin’s latest paper on how to better compare things — in this case, stocks — in order to more effectively derive their relative values. The paper is titled How Well Do You Compare. Michael first talks about how we are wired to use analogies to try and understand things and arrive at conclusions. This is very useful but it’s also full of cognitive pitfalls when analyzing complex subjects where the most available analogy may not be the most useful. He then lays out a number of frameworks available to do comparative analysis;...
Indian share markets finished at fresh life-time highs on the last trading day of 2017, capping off a remarkable year which saw the benchmark surging by 28%. At the closing bell last week, the BSE Sensex closed higher by 209 points and the NSE Nifty finished higher by 53 points. The S&P BSE Mid Cap finished up by 0.7% while S&P BSE Small Cap finished up by 0.6%. Gains were largely seen in power sector, auto sector and software sector. Top Stocks to Watch Out Biocon share price is expected to be in limelight today after the company’s proposed biosimilar trastuzumab has been approved by Brazilian regulatory agency ANVISA, throug...