A Key Reversal?
If we close on or near the low today, we will have printed what is known in candlestick charting as shooting star. I don’t put a lot of faith in technical analysis but this pattern and its reverse, called a hammer, are the most predictive technical patterns I’ve seen in my long career. The shooting .. read more
Legal Duplicity
Christopher Rad of Cedar Park, Texas, was just sentenced to 71 months in prison for executing a technologically advanced update of a very old stock scam. Mr. Rad enlisted the aid of hackers and spammers to spread rumors and interest equity investors in various stocks, including RSUV, QRVS, VSHE, SVXA, and ASIC. The scheme involved .. read more
Happy Mother’s Day Mr. Bernanke
In light of the current low interest rate environment, we are watching particularly closely for instances of “reaching for yield” and other forms of excessive risk-taking, which may affect asset prices and their relationships with fundamentals. It is worth emphasizing that looking for historically unusual patterns or relationships in asset prices can be useful even .. read more
More On Housing Volatility
I noted last week that housing data has become increasingly noisy, largely due to the sharp rise in activity last summer. With that in mind, recent data has been coming in largely consistent with a slowdown or pause in housing and housing-related activity. If this new data is correct (again, it is hard to tell .. read more
Confessions Of A Gloomy Gus
I have recently been accused of being a paid up member of the gloom and doom club. Well, actually accused might be too strong; informed is probably more accurate. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how these weekly missives might be perceived but based on recent feedback the perception out there seems .. read more
Deja Vu All Over Again?
Gold dropped 20%. Oil dropped over 10%. The Goldman Sachs Commodity Index dropped 11%. The US Dollar rose. Last week? No, that’s what happened in the first week of July of 2008. Last week’s rout in the commodities markets was eerily similar to that week nearly 5 years ago when the first signs of the .. read more
Pot Meets Kettle
Late Friday the Treasury Department released its semi-annual report on global exchange rates or as I like to call it, the semi-annual report on why all other countries on planet earth should let their currencies rise against the UD Dollar. Or maybe the semi-annual report on how easy monetary policy by other countries’ central banks .. read more
Financial Impulsion
You’ve probably read about financial repression in which governments or their agents interfere in the market in an effort to reduce debt. The most obvious recent example is the Fed and other central banks interfering in bond markets and suppressing interest rates. While these central banks generally justify this act on the grounds that it .. read more
