All eyes are now focused on Spain, where last week?s failed bond auction took yields back over 6% for ten year paper, and the pain is clearly not confined to the plain. But longer term focused analysts are wondering if France is really the next big over ripe piece of fruit to fall in Europe.
The market hung on tenterhooks all last week, waiting for the Chinese Q1 GDP figure. As recently as Thursday, rumors swept the market that the number could be as high as 9%, well above the consensus figure of 8.4%, taking the Dow up a red hot 181 points. When the flash hit in the afternoon
A few years ago, I went to a charity fund raiser at San Francisco?s priciest jewelry store, Shreve & Co., where the well-heeled men bid for dinner with the local high society beauties, dripping in diamonds and Channel No. 5. Well fueled with champagne, I jumped into a spirited bidding war for one of the
I am getting a lot of emails about how to come out of the $450-$480 Apple bull call spread, which I advised readers to go into on March 2. Now that we are deep in the money, what is the best way to take a profit? Well, the first thing for me is to say
The prospect of a runaway printing press at the Federal Reserve has been the overwhelming factor driving risk assets in 2012.? Being the sober, cautious guy that you all know me to be, I did not join the party. I tell people this is because if I lose all my money I am too old
As we continue flirting with a final top in equities for the year, I am stepping up my search for the best ways to participate on the downside. At the very top of the list are the homebuilders, one of the top performing sectors since the October, 2011 bottom. The performance of individual names has
I am sitting here on Easter weekend sifting through pages and pages from the various technical programs I follow warning that the roof is about to cave in on the stock market. Friday?s nonfarm payroll bombshell was dropped right at a key, make or break level for the S&P 500 and the Dow Average. Hold
Last week saw a dramatic deterioration in the economic data that has been the foundation of the Great Bull Market of 2012. First, we read minutes from a Federal Reserve meeting suggesting that QE3 has been put on a back burner. Then the Department of Labor?s Friday nonfarm payroll report poured gasoline on the fire,
With the Federal Reserve signaling yesterday that QE3 is off the table, many traders are now betting that the barbarous relic is about to take a prolonged vacation. Without a dividend or an interest yield in a world desperate for cash flow, the yellow metal suddenly doesn?t have so much to offer. Take away the
That is the conundrum facing traders, investors, and individuals as we enter the new quarter. For some hedge fund managers, Q1, 2012 was clearly the quarter from hell. I have been in the market for four decades, long enough to collect an encyclopedia worth of words of wisdom. One of my favorites has always been
You know how I love second helpings, especially when the sushi bar is involved. I especially like unagi, or cooked eel, which is said to be an oriental aphrodisiac. I am going to take advantage of Japan?s fiscal year end book closing on March 30 to reenter my short position of the Japanese yen. This
This time I am going to start with the fundamental argument first, then follow up with the Trade Alert. We are getting perilously close to a substantial pull back in global risk assets. While this has already started in commodities, the ags, oil, copper, and precious metals, we have yet to see the whites of
ETF's are much more attractive than mutual fund competitors, with their notoriously bloated expenses and spendthrift marketing costs. You can't miss those glitzy, overproduced, big budget ads on TV for a multitude of mutual fund families. You know, the ones with the senior couple holding hands walking down the beach into the sunset, the raging
After my year in the White House Press Corps, I vowed never to return, and took a really long shower, hoping to scrub every last spec of prejudice, self-interest, and institutionalized dishonesty off of my battered carcass. But sometimes I see some maneuvering that is so unprincipled, crooked, and against the national interest that I
The inside story on the collapse of volatility is now out, and as a result, managers are reviewing the harsh lessons learned and tweaking their strategies. It highlights the dangers of buying securities without reading the prospectus and understanding what is under the hood. As investors piled into stocks in February, they also bought downside
Looking for beneficiaries of the coming collapse of the Japanese yen (FXY), (YCS), Toyota Motors (TM) has to be at the very top of your list. A cheaper domestic currency brings a lower cost of production, high foreign sales proceeds, and wider profit margins all the way around. I am probably the only person in
I?m hearing from my buddies in Japan that while things are already quite bad in that enchanting country, they are about to get a whole lot worse, and that it is time to start scaling into a major short in the yen. Australia and China have already raised interest rates, to be followed by the
Long term readers of this letter are well aware of my antipathy towards General Motors (GM). For decades, the company turned a blind ear to customer complaints about shoddy, uncompetitive products, arcane management practices, entitled dealers, and a totally inward looking view of the world that was rapidly globalizing. It was like watching a close
The market was buzzing today about the continued collapse of volatility and the significance thereof today. Today the chief whipping boy was the double leveraged Velocity Shares 2X Vix ETF (TVIX), which cratered 33% on the day, and down 90% from its October high. This was on a day when the ETF should have gone
Much of Wall Street was scratching their heads yesterday as the iPath S&P 500 Vix Short Term Futures ETN (VXX) plunged to new lifetime lows despite a 69 point decline in the Dow index. It wasn?t supposed to work that way. Falling markets should send investors scrambling to buy downside protection in the form of