Beginning with subprime concerns in 2007, the United States had to throw all kinds of spaghetti at the Wall before noodles began to stick. For instance, the Federal Reserve first slashed interest rates. Later, in March of 2008, the Fed and J.P. Morgan orchestrated a buy-out of Bear Stearns. In September, the SEC banned the short-selling of financial [...] Continue Reading...
For four consecutive days, the Dow Jones Industrials rose or fell 400 points or more. In fact, that’s never happened before in the history of the U.S. market. Does it matter? (No, seriously. What can one glean from this historical factoid?) Well, we can take note that new records are not all that surprising… not when the trading [...] Continue Reading...
On 8/2/11, the same day that President Obama signed a bipartisan bill to raise the debt ceiling, the stock market floor collapsed. Specifically, the S&P 500 closed below its 200-day moving average — a technical trendline for stock buying support. Indeed, the heralded benchmark of U.S. stocks hadn’t finished below its 200-day MA since last September. Equally disconcerting, [...] Continue Reading...
As the mainstream media touted the NASDAQ’s best day in 6 months, its Powershares proxy (QQQ) has remained range-bound for the past 10 weeks. Similarly, as CNBC guests heralded earnings successes from chip-giant Intel to industrial conglomerate United Technologies, the S&P 500 SPDR Trust (SPY) had failed to appear on the new “52-Week High” list. The fact that popular [...] Continue Reading...
The broader S&P 500 may not have fallen far enough to have met the technical definition of a stock market correction. Yet we shouldn’t dismiss an intra-day, high-to-low pullback of 7% as unremarkable. (For that matter, there may be more selling pressure ahead.) On the flip side, what if the worst of the selling has passed [...] Continue Reading...
Throughout 2010, some of the most desired investments included energy pipeline partnerships, convertible bonds, preferred stocks, REITs, junk bonds and dividend stocks. Pick any area in the first 10 months… you were shaking your money maker. Best of all, the lower risk Total Return ETFs had been keeping pace with riskier Common Stock ETFs. Then came the Republican election victories, Federal [...] Continue Reading...
The custodian for the overwhelming majority of my client assets under management is TD Ameritrade. So there are few ETF advocates as happy as I am about free trades on vehicles from the Big 3: iShares, Vanguard, State Street. (Note: There are a few ETFs from PowerShares, VanEck and WisdomTree, but they are noticeably small in number.) In [...] Continue Reading...
The financial media continue to perpetuate a “risk trade on, risk trade off” myth. Yet a better representation of what’s taking place in market-based securities is “developed market risk off, emerging market risk on.” Is it true that nearly every U.S. Treasury Bond ETF has been hitting 52-week highs on a daily basis? Absolutely. Yet you shouldn’t [...] Continue Reading...
Even a devout follower of financial news may have missed it; that is, the real engine behind renewed bullishness is the continuation of the China growth story. Granted, there’s been a variety of exceptional earnings reports, including UPS, 3M, Apple, Qualcomm and Pepsico. However, plenty of others expressed ”unusual uncertainty,” such as Amazon, Google, Starbucks and Bank of [...] Continue Reading...
According to internal estimates in China, economic growth slowed more than investors had been hoping for. That idea renewed fears that China may be tightening its growth reins a bit too harshly. Zip-lining over to Europe, there are freshwater concerns about European banks. At present, they need to repay hundreds of billions in euros in emergency loans that they received, giving rise to panic about [...] Continue Reading...
