All About The AI? It's an AI stock world and all the other stocks are just living in it, right? That is the persistent narrative we've been hearing for at least a couple of years and while the story is starting to see some cracks, it is still widely believed. There is still an underlying whiff of FOMO surrounding the [...]
Can Tech Stocks Keep Outperforming? Technology stocks have been outperforming for a long time. That's how technology gets to be nearly 40% of the S&P 500 and the Russell 1000 and 60% of the NASDAQ 100. The concentration of the indexes in technology stocks is a function of how well they've performed and the performance has solid, fundamental roots. They [...]
Question everything. Learn something. Answer nothing. Euripides Investors live in a world of noise. Every day the financial media pumps out content designed to capture your attention. An economic report will generate multiple analyses, some bullish, some bearish, looking at identical data and arriving at opposite conclusions. Social media amplifies it all, creating a cacophony of competing memes, all designed [...]
Where's the global economic meltdown? We're 3 months into a war with Iran, the Strait of Hormuz closed. 20% of global LNG is shutdown for the next 3 years, 20% of global crude oil production is being affected, 30% of global fertilizer supply is shut off, and roughly a third of global helium supply is bottled up in the gulf. [...]
Stock markets the world over celebrated the end of the Iran War last week with many closing the week at all-time highs: Large cap (S&P 500, Russell 1000), Small cap (Russell 2000, S&P 600), NASDAQ, Emerging Markets, Asia ex-Japan, Latin America 40, Canada, Australia, Israel, Poland, Italy, Netherlands, Austria, Spain, Singapore, Taiwan, and Brazil all closed at all-time highs (based [...]
Stocks were up nearly 4% last week due to a ceasefire between the US and Iran that was supposed to open the Strait of Hormuz and allow oil to start flowing again. Crude oil fell 14% while the GSCI commodity index fell almost 7%. The dollar, which really hadn't rallied much during the conflict, fell 1.3%. All of this despite [...]
The Post-COVID Volatility When one thinks back on all that has happened since 2020, it is, I think, amazing how little the US economy has changed over that time. Obviously, the economy was volatile during the shutdown of the economy during COVID and during the period when the economy was re-opening. Real GDP fell over 7% in the second quarter [...]
Sentiment about the economy is negative right now, but that isn't a new development. The University of Michigan consumer sentiment survey is near its all-time worst reading, which was set just a few years ago in 2022. The expectations portion of that survey is currently at levels only seen in the mid-70s, near the bottom of the '73/74 bear market, [...]
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