Over the last few weeks, the market has been looking for a bullish hook on which to hang its hat. Speculation since the middle of March has centered around the theme that the Fed might finally be prompted to begin tapering the hawkish approach it’s been applying to monetary policy for most of the past […]
Read MoreAs a conservative-minded, value and fundamental-driven investor, my natural tendency is to shy away from stocks that market experts and popular market media analysts tend to talk to the most about. That means that my investments rarely look very sexy – but I’m far more interested in being able to keep my money working for […]
Read MoreThe Food Products industry in the Consumer Staples sector is an area of the market that tends to get overlooked because, let’s face it, it just isn’t very sexy. Even so, it is one of very few segments of the market that saw consumer-driven improvements in demand in 2020, especially in the early stages of […]
Read MoreNo matter what current market conditions may be at any given time, one of the primary questions any long-term focused investor – whether you prefer a growth or value approach – should be whether the strength of the underlying business is strong enough to justify a stock’s current price. For growth-focused investors, the question is […]
Read MoreFor more than two years – even before COVID-19 became a global pandemic that collapsed economic and social activity for most of 2020 and that continues to strain health care systems and keep pressure on a variety of economic forces – I’ve been writing about the wisdom in being very selective about the investments you […]
Read MoreAs wrap up 2021 and look toward 2022, the sad and simple truth is that, no matter how much we might want to be able stop including COVID-19 and its impact on every aspect of life in our daily discussions, the health crisis hasn’t gone away, but instead is showing more persistence than any of […]
Read MoreOver the last three years, I’ve used economic uncertainty – first from a year-long trade war through 2019, and then of course the COVID-19 pandemic starting in 2020 – as the basis for a lot of the analysis, and certainly some of my own investments in the marketplace. I think that when economic conditions become […]
Read MoreThis week has seen the market reclaim much of the ground it gave up after Thanksgiving, as fears about the new omicron coronavirus variant have eased as indications are that while it is, indeed highly contagious, it also seems to be less severe than other variants, like delta that continue to plague global health systems. […]
Read MoreTraditional, growth-oriented investing puts most of its emphasis on stocks that have already started moving up. That makes sense when you consider the popular technical idiom that a “stock tends to follow the direction of its next longer trend.” That means that when you can clearly see a stock going up, it should continue to […]
Read MoreOne of the things that always seems to be a little bit ironic to me about the markets is the way that fear tends to weave a web of intrigue and uncertainty under just about all conditions. That often means that when the market starts to correct, investors, analysts and economists don’t just look for […]
Read MoreFor more than two years – even before COVID-19 became a global pandemic that collapsed economic and social activity for most of 2020 and that continues to strain health care systems and keep pressure on a variety of economic forces – I’ve been writing about the wisdom in being very selective about the investments you […]
Read MoreHave you noticed that market media tends to focus on just a few segments of the market at a time, while at the same time pretty much dismissing all the others? I think at least part of the reason is that investors are always looking for the “next big thing” in the stock market to […]
Read MoreOver the last couple of weeks, the market has dropped off of its latest high, and really started picking up bearish momentum at the end of last week as investors turned their attention to the Fed’s monthly governor’s meeting and whether signs of increasing economic activity would mean that interest rates might finally start going […]
Read MoreOne of the interesting trends that seems to inevitably come out of periods of economic uncertainty is investor rotation into “defensive” sectors, which usually includes Utilities, Consumer Staples and other pockets of the market that investors tend to think of as safe havens when market uncertainty is high. Another favorite topic analysts seem to like […]
Read MoreThroughout 2021, investors have increasingly been looking for reasons to look ahead – past the pandemic and to the day when we can finally say the whole thing is in the past. Many hoped that, with vaccinations becoming increasingly available, we would finally be able to stop talking about COVID-19 and its variants and start […]
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