Oil prices were among some of the most dramatically impacted components of the global economy at the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic. As businesses were shuttered, and shelter-in-place orders ground economic activity everywhere to a halt, demand for crude oil cratered; both West Texas Intermediate (WTI) and Brent crude fell to shockingly low levels. […]
Read MoreIntel Corp (INTC) is a stock that I’ve followed for quite some time, and that I’ve written about in this space quite a bit over the past year. This is one of the 600-lb gorillas of the Technology sector, after all, and the company that is easily considered the gold standard of companies in the […]
Read MoreIt’s been interesting in the last week, with the inauguration of a new President to see how the market has shifted its focus. Considering the often mixed messaging that came from the Trump administration, it isn’t too surprising to think that a President that is expected to act more like – well, more like a […]
Read MoreFor the stock market, 2021 clearly appears to reflect investor’s desire to move away from the pandemic-dominated conversations of 2020 and look ahead. One of the ways that has been seen over the last few weeks is in a pretty broad rotation away from conservative, defensive-oriented stocks in sectors like Consumer Staples and into more […]
Read MoreMy approach to value-based investing is something that represents the result of a lot of experience, both good and bad over more than two decades of time. One of the big questions that I had to answer for myself fairly early in the process was simple: out of the thousands of stocks that are available […]
Read MoreOne of the classic benchmarks of the economy’s health and strength is the housing market. Stocks of retail companies like Home Depot (HD) and Lowe’s (LOW) often serve as proxies of to guide the market’s perception of the housing market, but it also isn’t uncommon to see experts and analysts referring to homebuilders like D.R. […]
Read MorePart of taking a smart, value-based approach to investing in the stock market involves keeping track of information on industry and economic trends that are likely to have broad residual impacts on market activity. That means paying attention to things that often get talked about on financial media like unemployment and interest rates. I have […]
Read MoreOne of the early threads of this new year, aside from commentary and opinion about the political landscape, rising COVID-19 infections (not to mention a new strain that appears to be more infectious than the first) is the way the Financial sector has been among the sectors that have led the market higher. Two weeks […]
Read MoreThroughout the course of the last couple of years I’ve found the Consumer Staples sector, and specifically the Food Products industry a good place to find useful investing opportunities. In 2018 and 2019, a lot of that was being driven by international trade concerns that increased uncertainty in the marketplace. 2020 made the industry a […]
Read MoreNo matter what current market conditions are at any given time, the point of value-oriented investing is to find stocks that offer attractive long-term upside. For my approach, that means using a combination of valuation, fundamental strength, and technical analysis to filter through the thousands of stocks that are available. The market’s rally to fresh […]
Read MoreOne of the sectors that has seen an impressive rally over the last couple of months is the Energy sector. As measured by the U.S. Energy iShares ETF (IYE), the sector has increased from a trend low point at the end of October by about 54%. Much of that increase has been driven by a […]
Read MoreAs a value-focused investor with more than a bit of a contrarian bent, I tend to get nervous when stocks keep making one new high after another, and I like it when I see stocks trading at or near historical lows. That’s pretty different than the mindset of most investors that focus on growth first, […]
Read MoreIf you think strictly about price performance and what the price of a stock is now relative to where it was in the past – in particular, relative to where it was on a pre-pandemic basis – it’s pretty easy to understand why so much attention has been paid to Tech stocks that make remote […]
Read MoreOne of the challenges that investors have had to deal with throughout the past year is the market’s divergence from economic facts on the ground. From the early stages of the pandemic, analysts could not agree whether the expected, eventual recovery from both a health and economic-driven perspective would manifest as by a move back […]
Read MoreWith thousands of publicly available stocks to work with, the question most investors face when looking for ways to keep their money working for them isn’t really about which stocks they might be able to use. I’ve spent more than two decades watching the markets and studying different investing and trading styles and methods. What […]
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