One of the last things to be tossed overboard in the late innings of a bull market is discrimination. Instead of comparing the valuations of different assets and buying relative bargains, investors (known in retrospect as “dumb money”) just pour cash into the things that have been going up. This gives those favored assets one […]
Michael Pento: Trillion-Dollar Stocks And The Coming ETF Disaster
The latest from Michael Pento: There are a handful of stocks in which institutions and individual investors have recently piled into. This behavior is emblematic of all bull markets once they begin to hit the manic phase. Wall Street falls in love with a few high-growth darlings and takes their valuations up to the thermosphere. […]
As Solar Eats The Energy Sector, It’s Time To Revise The “Real Assets” List
In the energy market, there’s always a revolution going on somewhere. For most of human history, light and heat were provided by wood and candles. Then we discovered whale oil, and in the early 1800s lamps replaced candles. Later in that century, kerosene, a petroleum derivative, became the lamp oil of choice, and the whaling […]
Tales From The Casino, Part 1: Funds That Bet On Volatility Might SPIKE Volatility, Crashing The Markets
It’s a measure of modern financial markets’ absurdity that bets on bets on bets have come to seem normal. Maybe acronyms like CLO and CDO make them sound scientific. Or maybe it’s the sense that if Wall Street’s “rocket scientists” create something it must be highly advanced and therefore beneficial for society. But in reality, […]
Michael Pento: Here’s How You Know The Market Is Overvalued
There’s a lively debate out there over the size of the Everything Bubble. In the following excerpt, money manager Michael Pento concludes that this bubble both histocially huge and soon to be popped. When Overvalued And Dangerous Markets Meet Stagflation To put into perspective how overvalued and dangerous the US market has become; I often […]
The End Of The Bull Market, In Three Charts
Stocks have completely recovered from their flash bear market of late 2018. But now they face a hard question: Can already record high prices continue to rise in the face of falling corporate profits? Let’s start with the “falling corporate profits” part: A business generates improving profits when the things it sells rise in price […]
Michael Pento: Finally, Corporate Stock Buybacks Blow Up
The last few years of the Everything Bubble were driven by the ultimate dumb money: corporations borrowing to buy back their stock at record high prices. A whole generation of CEOs and CFOs were able to pad both their reputations and their year-end bonuses this way while, it seemed, blatantly screwing over their employees and […]
The World’s Biggest Hedge Fund Is Getting Whacked, And Why “Moneyness” Matters
A few years ago the Swiss National Bank (SNB) – which traditionally held “monetary assets” like government bonds, cash and gold to back up the Swiss franc — decided to branch out into common stocks. This was a departure, but for a while a brilliant one. The SNB loaded up on Big Tech like Apple, […]
Has This Become A “Short Everything In Sight” Market?
One of the strangest things about this strangest-ever expansion has been the way pretty much everything went up. Stocks, bonds, real estate, art, oil – some of which have historically negative correlations with others — all rose more-or-less in lock-step. And within asset classes, the big names behaved the same way, rising regardless of their […]
Corporate Share Buybacks Looking Dumber By The Day
A recent MarketWatch article notes that: GE was one of Wall Street’s major share buyback operators between 2015 and 2017; it repurchased $40 billion of shares at prices between $20 and $32. The share price is now $8.60, so the company has liquidated between $23 billion and $29 billion of its shareholders’ money on this […]
Michael Pento: Falling Corporate Earnings Will Fuel The Next Leg Of The Bear Market
If corporate earnings rise in 2019 like Wall Street analysts expect, stocks are a screaming buy at these bear-market levels. But earnings won’t rise and stocks are not a buy, says money manager Michael Pento: Earnings Recession of 2019 President Trump’s plan to stimulate the economy, known as The Tax Cut and Jobs Act, was […]
GE, Nvidia, Nordstrom, Bitcoin All Tank, And The Fed Notices
The sense that something isn’t right out there just got a lot stronger. And the Fed, in response, is now tiptoeing back towards QE. Let’s start with the sudden bad news: Chipmaker Nvidia plunges after missing on revenue and guidance (CNBC) – Nvidia stock fell as much as 19 percent Thursday after the company reported […]
A Palpable Sense Of Panic
Based the last few days’ headlines you’d never know the world is in year 10 of a pretty good expansion. Check this out: Not terrified of a recession? These stocks hint you should be Cyclical commodities continue to weaken, gold moves in relation Italian banks on verge of new crisis on €400 million hole at […]
The World’s Smartest Investors Can’t Figure Out The Markets – And That’s A Really Bad Thing
Hedge fund managers sit at the top of the financial world’s food chain. They’re generally seen as the smartest money managers, and their companies have the most flexibility to pursue new opportunities. The result is supposed to be the best possible returns – for clients who can afford the high fees. But lately things haven’t […]
Rising Wages = Shrinking Corporate Profit Margins … And Falling Stock Prices?
Today’s Wall Street Journal contains a couple of charts that illustrate a relationship that’s not getting much media attention these days: The fact that tightening labor markets are forcing companies to raise wages, in the process squeezing their own profit margins. Historically this margin compression has been either a cause of or contributor to cyclical […]
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