Acting Man

Pros and Cons The recent rally in commodity prices has surprised many market participants and has greatly supported the stock market’s rebound. It has also made bulls out of a number of former...

Damned If You Do… After waking up on Thursday, we quickly glanced at the overnight market action in Asia and noticed that the Nikkei had tanked rather noticeably. Our first thought upon seeing...

Buy Low, Sell High? It is an old truism and everybody has surely heard it more than once. If you want to make money in the stock market, you’re supposed to buy low and sell high. Simple,...

Dismal Earnings, Extreme ValuationsThe current earnings season hasn’t been very good so far. Companies continue to “beat expectations” of course, but this is just a silly game. The...

Economic and Demographic ChangesWe have discussed China’s debt and malinvestment problems in these pages extensively in the past (most recently we have looked at various efforts to keep the yuan...

Options Expiration Ante Portas – Just as a Resistance Level is ReachedAfter we had penned our little missive on the breakout in gold stocks on Monday, it dawned on us that an options expiration...

The Yen Breaks Out A few days ago we discussed the yen’s trend change and what appeared at the time to be an imminent breakout. This breakout has now actually occurred, and looks quite...

Myths That Just Won’t Die Gold just had its best quarter in 30 years. Not surprisingly, gold bears are coming out of the woodwork en masse in the mainstream media and the analyst community (see...

The G-20 and Policy CoordinationReaders may recall that the last G20 pow-wow (see “The Gasbag Gabfest” for details) featured an uncharacteristic lack of grandiose announcements, a fact we...

Gold went down (as the muggles would measure it, in dollars). It dropped almost 40 bucks. Silver fell almost 60 cents. Since silver fell proportionally farther than gold, the gold-silver ratio went...

Still Slowing Down Year-end distortions have begun to slowly come out of the data, and while broad true US money supply growth remains fairly brisk, it has begun to slow again relative to...

A Useful Leading Indicator? We often see charts comparing the S&P 500 to the growth in the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet, or more specifically, to assets held by the Fed. There is...

A Whiff of Panic Ahead of Thursday’s ECB meeting, there was a widespread consensus that Europe’s chief printing press supervisor would make up for the alleged “mistake” of...

Perverse IncentivesWe haven’t written about Australia’s residential real estate bubble for some time (readers may want to check out last year’s post “Australia’s Bubble...