It’s time again for our weekly gasoline update based on data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA). The price of Regular and Premium were down two and one cent(s), respectively, from last week. According to GasBuddy.com, Hawaii has the highest average price for Regular at $3.23 and Santa Barbara, CA is the most expensive city, averaging $3.32. Oklahoma has the cheapest at $2.14. The WTIC end of day spot price closed at 57.99, a 0.9% increase from this time last week. How far are we from the interim high prices of 2011 and the all-time highs of 2008? Here’s a visual answer. The next chart is a monthly chart overlay o...
Long-end bond yields are lower and the front-end higher once again this morning as the US Treasury yield curve continues to confound by flattening. Bloomberg macro strategist Mark Cudmore suspects there is more to come… for one simple reason, so often overlooked… Via Bloomberg, Cheaper eats are great, but maybe not if you’re one of the many expecting a sustainable bump in bond yields next year. Falling food prices risk wrecking the forecasts — seen pretty much every December for years now — for yields to climb in the new year. Ten-year Treasury rates haven’t closed a year above 2.45 percent since 2013. Bond bears ...
Mike Gleason: It is my privilege now to welcome in Michael Pento, President and founder of Pento Portfolio Strategies and author of the book, The Coming Bond Market Collapse: How to Survive the Demise of the U.S. Debt Market. Michael is a well-known and successful money manager and has been a regular guest on CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox Business News, and also the Money Metals Podcast, and shares is astute insights on markets and geopolitics from the perspective of an Austrian School economist’s viewpoint. Michael, welcome back. Thanks for joining us again and, how are you? Michael Pento: I’m doing fine. Thanks for having me back on Mike...
Natural gas prices gapped up a couple percent last evening and held there through much of the day today, settling up just over 2% on the day. Yet prices were not able to continue higher from the gap, raising concerns for bulls that expected more of a recovery. The gap up was not a surprise to subscribers, as on Friday we alerted that there were more bullish than bearish long-range weather risks headed into the weekend, and that we expected model guidance to finally pick up more of them by Sunday evening. We then saw long-range cold risks as one of the key driving factors that supported prices today. The weather’s influence can best ...
It is indisputable that 2017 has been a challenging year in regards to natural disasters. Hurricane Harvey wrought more than $180 billion in damage to Texas, while Hurricane Maria cost upwards of $95 billion, according to some estimates. With California wildfires raging from north to south and Moody’s now factoring in climate change-related damages into its municipal bond stability forecasts, the stability of the reinsurance industry might now seem in question. But that does not appear to be an issue, according to a December report on insurance stability. After one of the worst quarters in reinsurance history, 2017 expected to be a largel...
Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN), the online retail giant, has seen its stock price skyrocket more than 50% over the last 12 months. It has surged past the $1,000 price level, which was tricky to break through, and has continued to climb since then. Many investors are looking at the euphoric Amazon stock price movement and wondering if now is a good time to short the stock. The answer is no. There’s never a good time to short a cult-like stock such as Amazon. It doesn’t trade on normal parameters, and it operates a business model that doesn’t have to generate a profitfor its stock to go up. These types of companies are almost impossible ...
Leverage, in particular financial leverage, is the amount of debt that an entity uses to buy more assets. In corporate finance, debt financing is a well-known term, which is used as a tool by companies to ensure smooth business operations. Since companies have limited funds, they need exogenous funding to boost their financial resources from time to time for expansion of operations. Even with the option for equity financing, companies prefer borrowing funds as these are easily and cheaply available. Moreover, using financial leverage rather than acquiring more equity capital is favored as equity financing reduces the earnings per share of exi...
Video length: 00:14:06 Stocks slowly drift higher today and less than 1% from their all time highs across the board. This is the perfect time to access your risk across all of your trading and investment accounts. Watch this crucial video market update to learn how to analyze what your risk is and one strategy you can use to easily hedge a market correction....
At the beginning of 2017, expectations were pretty high that the pharma and biotech sector would finally see lots of mergers and acquisitions (M&As). However, that did not happen. While a few high-value deals were announced, the focus was mostly on small bolt-on acquisitions and licensing deals and agreements. According to Mergermarket’s Global Pharma, Medical & Biotech trend report for Q317, M&A in the global pharma, medical and biotechnology sector was in the range of $207.6 billion spanning 1,040 deals so far this year, declining 9.9% from the year-ago period. The dip was mostly attributable to the pharma and medical sectors....
Note: This commentary has been updated to include Friday morning’s release of Nonfarm Employment for November. Official recession calls are the responsibility of the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee, which is understandably vague about the specific indicators on which they base their decisions. This committee statement is about as close as they get to identifying their method. There is, however, a general belief that there are four big indicators that the committee weighs heavily in their cycle identification process. They are: Nonfarm Employment Industrial Production Real Retail Sales Real Personal Income (excluding Transfer Rec...