Most Americans have spent the last few years pressed up against the proverbial bakery window, watching the 1% enjoy a life of ever-increasing wealth and seemingly total indifference to the multitudes who aren’t favored by zero interest rates, big trust funds and political/corporate connections. The one consolation for the have-nots has been that, by owning […]
So That’s What Volatility Looks Like
2017 was literally the smoothest stretch of highway that US stocks have ever traveled. Rising almost every day and seldom falling hard, they made it virtually impossible for investors to lose money. Here’s the Dow Jones Industrial Average over the past two years. Note how unnaturally smooth the recent action was. As a result, measures […]
Some Classic Short-Sale Candidates Get Even Better
Six months ago, recreational vehicle sales were booming and the companies making those expensive, gas-guzzling rolling houses were riding high. See The Perfect Crash Indicator Is Flashing Red. And now? Same story, even bigger numbers – but with a decidedly more skeptical treatment in the media: Hipsters Go Glamping, and RV Makers Soar (Wall Street […]
The Dumbest Dumb Money Finally Gets Suckered In
Corporate share repurchases have turned out to be a great mechanism for converting Federal Reserve easing into higher consumer spending. Just allow public companies to borrow really cheaply and one of the things they do with the resulting found money is repurchase their stock. This pushes up equity prices, making investors feel richer and more […]
Last Time This Happened, Part 2: Consumers Are Both Confident And Broke
Elliott Wave International recently put together a chart (click here or on the chart to watch the accompanying video) that illustrates a recurring theme of financial bubbles: When good times have gone on for a sufficiently long time, people forget that it can be any other way and start behaving as if they’re bulletproof. They […]
This Bubble Gets Its “Alternative Paradigm”
Towards the end of financial bubbles, asset prices behave in ways that can’t be explained with rational/historical metrics. So new ones are invented to make sense of things. In the 1990s tech stock bubble, earnings were “optional” and “eyeballs” – that is, the number of visitors to a dot-com’s website – were what determined value. […]
Rationality Versus The Market
The late stages of financial bubbles are always tough for rational analysts. Focused as they are on the numbers, such analysts are relatively immune to the emotion that drives the action at market extremes, so they find themselves making predictions that turn out to be “wrong” for months and sometimes years. Then the cycle turns […]
Dumb – And Dumber — Money Keeps Pouring In
Someday, stock, bond and real estate valuations will matter again. And the mechanism by which this return to sanity is achieved will probably be the torrent of money now flowing in from people who, for various reasons, don’t care about (or understand) the prices they’re paying. Millennials, for instance, seem to have reached the “beginners’ […]
The Perfect Crash Indicator Is Flashing Red
What’s the last big toy you buy when things have been good for a really long time and you already have all the other toys? An RV, of course. A dubious thing to own if you already have a house, but when the good times seem likely to roll on forever, why the hell not? […]
The Second Dumbest Kind Of Money Is Pouring Into Stocks — “With A Vengeance”
One of the traditional signs of market tops is individual investors finally succumbing to the lure of apparently easy money and pouring their savings into the stock market. In the past this dumb money flowed into equity mutual funds in general. But today it’s favoring exchange traded funds (ETFs) that, rather than trying to pick […]
This Is Why You Don’t Own A Lot Of Stocks
You’d think that by now every relevant measure of stock market overvaluation would have been converted into a chart and circulated throughout the blogosphere. But Zero Hedge has come up with a new one depicting how long the typical wage slave has to work to buy the typical stock. And – surprise – it shows […]
Major Inflection Point Coming
Fund manager John Hussman is always good for dramatic charts. Here’s a recent one: This ratio is even scarier than it looks, says Hussman: Historically-reliable valuation measures now approach those observed at the 2000 bubble peak. Yet even this comparison overlooks the fact that in 2000, the overvaluation featured a subset of very large-capitalization stocks […]
2007 All Over Again, Part 6: Stock Valuations Enter “Crash” Territory
The Trump Christmas stock market rally has taken valuations beyond a point that in the past has signaled trouble, which in turn has generated a lot of cautionary press like the following: Market indicator hits extreme levels last seen before plunges in 1929, 2000 and 2008 (CNBC) – While the S&P 500 is reaching all-time […]
The Boredom Before The Storm
With all the surprising and/or disturbing things going on – Brexit, China’s soaring debt, US/Russia/China saber rattling, the, um, unique US presidential race, the cyber attack that shut down big parts of the US Internet – you’d think that an unsettled world would be reflected in skittish financial markets. Instead we’re getting the opposite, with […]
Corporations – And Corporate Execs — Fall Out Of Love With Their Shares
It’s no secret that one of the main things propping up the US stock market has been corporations’ willingness to buy back their own shares with borrowed money. The following chart illustrates the rather amazing correlation between share repurchases and share prices. This was obviously a short-lived strategy, one that would end when companies got […]