Insights

OK; I'm back after taking a break Friday and Monday. Over the scary and volatile months of August and September this year the stock market has basically been in a trading range between 1,120 and 1,220 on the S&P 500. Moves within the range have been very sharp but...

Today's Drop We could use less excitement from this market. As I predicted yesterday, Asia and Europe fell hard when they opened today, and true to form it was European selling in our markets prior to 11 AM EST that got us off on a bad foot. By the end of the day it...

The Fed announced this PM that it was selling short-term securities to buy long-term. This is an effort to bring down long-term interest rates like mortgages, just as they have with short-term rates. The slang term for it is Operation Twist. Also, proceeds from...

Let me clear up the deception that the wealthy pay less in taxes than the rest of us, popularized by Warren Buffett's claim that his secretary pays more in taxes than he does. Pres. Obama brought this up when he announced his $1.5 trillion tax increase as a so-called...

Ben Bernanke had better announce something big tomorrow or the market will likely head lower. I think he most likely will, as I wrote in some detail yesterday. A Bernanke good report is being priced into stock prices, along with the report early today that the Greek...

After following Asia and Europe down by over 2% US stocks finished down 1%. The NASDAQ was actually up today, help by a big jump in Apple stock. Gold was -1.5%, bonds were up as was the US dollar. I think the US market is getting excited about what Ben Bernanke might...

The charts on stocks and bonds seem to call for a lower stock market from here. The wild cards are the US Fed and the Eurozone leaders. Remember how bad the markets were in August 2010 and the effect of the QE2 announcement. This is a great article on what Ben...

Stocks were down over 2% this morning but have bounced up to -1.8%. They followed Asia and Europe lower. The latter was down as much as 3% following a disappointing weekend in which the markets expected announcement of progress on the Greece situation and got nothing....

Its nice to have stocks moving in the right direction as the market went 5 for 5 this week. For the week the S&P 500 gained nearly 6% while gold lost 1%. Most European stocks were up in line with the US market but Germany gained nearly 10%. Asia was up only slightly....

It was a good day to hold stocks and oil, not so much bonds or gold. The S&P 500 was up 1.7%, gold was down 1.6% and most bonds were down. We're still waiting to see what kind of bailout the Europeans will come up with. Meanwhile, economic numbers are lousy in the US....