Insights

US stocks were up nicely today afte being down earlier this morning. Currently, the S&P 50 is up 0.75% today. Ben Bernanke had testimony before Congress where he delivered a rather downbeat statement on the economy. But, some are relieved that he didn't address any...

I have posted the July newsletter. It is a special issue on debt. As always, I have a section on the investment implications. Click on the Newsletters tab at the top of the page and select the most recent one.

Markets around the world are up today, most better than 1%. I can't find much of a reason for it other than short-term traders may have figured the recent leg down was the bottom of a see-saw pattern that you can clearly see in my short-term term chart I posted in...

How have stocks done over the last year? Here's a picture of the S&P 500 stock index. Click to enlarge the picture. Two things are quickly apparent: 1) Stocks have not made much progress in the last year. The 1 year return is 3.6% of which 1.6% is from price...

Alcoa kicked off the earnings reporting season today with a poor report. Earnings season is often somewhat volatile unless earnings have been on a good upward trend. The last couple years have seen corporate earnings move up to record-breaking territory and with the...

The US stock market is off 1% today following the lead of European markets which were down -0.5% (UK), -1.9% (Germany and France). Spain was down 3%, matching yesterday's loss. Year-to-date, Spanish stocks are down 21%. Portugal's woes point out a problem common to...

The S&P 500 stock index finished the shortened pre-holiday session with a gain of 0.62%. Bonds were up nicely again. Gold and natural gas were each up about 1.5% today but the real story was oil, up 5% for the day! All those probably have much to do with an...

The WSJ had a good set of charts today on the slowdown in Europe. Their charts are below or you can go to their site at www.wsj.com but you will need a current subscription. You can see the slowdown of manufacturing into negative (contraction) territory on the left...

European stock markets generally finished up more than 1% today. US stocks were down for most of the day after the disappointing manufacturing report but finished slightly higher. Bonds were up today after being down Friday. Natural gas was up 0.3% while oil lost over...

The worldwide slowdown is affecting US manufaturing which was reported today as very slightly contracting last month. An equivalent report came out for Europe earlier today. That leave economic growth up to the consumer, whose spending is up about 2.5% over the last...