All eyes will be focused on the weekly jobless claims to be released by the Department of Labor at 8:30 AM EST on Thursday. You may recall that investors did not exactly run the last two weekly reports up the flagpole and salute them, which showed sharp increases in unemployment claims. At this point the
It would be easy to ignore what is happening on the other side of the world, especially when they involve the French. But to do so today in this interconnected and interdependent world would be extremely hazardous to your wealth. When a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, the tsunami hits Japan. That is exactly
I ran into Minxin Pei, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Who imparted to me some iconoclastic out of consensus views on China?s position in the world today. He thinks that power is not shifting from West to East; Asia is just lifting itself off the mat, with per capita GDP only
?They got us into this mess, they?ve gotten great credit for getting out of this mess, and now they are creating even a bigger mess,? said the former chairman of Morgan Stanley International and a colleague of mine, Steve Roach.
My Apple April $450-$480 call spread expired deep in the money at the close on Friday. Legally, these expire at midnight on Saturday night, so your broker won?t take these off your statement until the following Monday. The position should be zeroed out and you should receive a cash credit. You will also find that
With all of the handwringing about the zero return on US equities for the last decade, I thought I'd better take a look at the long term charts. It's very clear that we have been trading in a gigantic sideways narrowing wedge for the last 18 years, defined by 14,000 on the upside and 6,000
Thanks to China's ?one child only? policy adopted 30 years ago, and a cultural preference for children who grow up to become family safety nets, there are now 32 million more boys under the age of 20 than girls. Large scale interference with the natural male:female ratio has been tracked with some fascination by demographers
?The US has repositioned itself better than any of its global competitors. Americans are doing what they do best. They?re adapting, they?re moving, they?re finding good, and they?re surviving. That?s where we need to be,? said Tom Barrack, CEO of Colony Capital, and a former principal of the Bass Group.
After spending all of this year ignoring the fiscal disaster that the US is facing at the end of 2012, markets are finally taking off the blinders. That might explain why the S&P 500 has dropped 4.3% so far from its April 1 peak and why it may have more to come. Remember the debt
I am a numbers guy. Show me the data and I?ll draw my own conclusions, ignoring conflicted brokerage research, the paid talking heads on TV, and all the politically motivated garbage pumped out by industry sponsored fake research institutes. I am also a glass half full kind of guy, willing to make a positive interpretation