For investors, the holiday season generally marks a time when consumer activity should be healthy and demand for consumer goods will be high. That’s a big reason that the latter part of the year, as the colder months set in across the country that retail stocks often start to see healthy increases in prices. That […]
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 More(Bloomberg) — The U.S. economy will spend 2022 learning to live with the coronavirus without much in the way of help from the Federal Reserve or the federal government — especially with the derailing of President Joe Biden’s $1.75 trillion spending plan. The Fed’s pivot last week toward tighter credit — ending its emergency bond-buying […]
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 MoreThe Tech sector has enjoyed a lion’s share of attention among all segments of the economy for a number of years. Throughout the pandemic, that attention only seemed both intensified and justified, as technology companies provided the tools that allowed much of corporate America to keep things going by shifting their workforces to remote working […]
Read More(Bloomberg) — Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers warned of the risk of a “spontaneous deflating of financial markets” that have been pumped up by retail buying and exuberant investors. There is “a lot of euphoria,” Summers said at an American Council for Capital Formation webinar on Tuesday — pointing, among other things, to cryptocurrencies, […]
Read MoreSometimes, answering the question of whether a stock represents a legitimate, attractive value opportunity can be hard to do. A company could be struggling not only to grow its business, but may be forced to restructure its business in a way that makes most of the traditional measurables investors like to use look very unfavorable. […]
Read More“Uncertainty” has been the buzzword of the last few weeks in the marketplace. The emergence of yet another new, highly contagious coronavirus variant continues to keep pressure on a medical system that is already strained to its limits on one side of the economic picture, while the Fed’s consideration of moving up its plan to […]
Read MoreThe Consumer Discretionary sector includes stocks that cover a wide variety of the Retail industry. Because there are so many retail companies that offer different products to consumers, it’s hard to pinpoint any kind of specific niche. In the sporting goods category, there were significant challenges even before COVID-19 became a global pandemic. Declining revenues […]
Read MoreFor a lot of different reasons, 2021 has been an interesting year for just about all of us. The pandemic has not abated this year as some experts predicted, and certainly as all of us hoped; the rise of the new COVID variants has kept pressures from the ongoing health crisis at the forefront of […]
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 MoreYou might have noticed that your options at the store are more limited than usual. This is because of the supply chain issues we all hear about every day. And don’t bother asking sales reps if they have more of anything in the backroom or the warehouse. Inventory levels across all industries are depleted. According […]
Read MoreUncertainty in the financial markets, and in the economy is usually considered a bad thing, because it makes things more difficult and stressful for everybody. Even though the major market indices have been pushing to new all-time highs for the last month, for example, there is still plenty of concern about the pace of inflationary […]
Read MoreThe country is facing a shortage of 80,000 truck drivers, warned the American Trucking Associations (ATA), an industry group representing big US trucking companies, on Oct. 25. It’s a warning they’ve more or less repeated every year since 2005. But it’s particularly worrying in the middle of a global supply chain crisis when there aren’t […]
Read More(Bloomberg) — Sign up for the New Economy Daily newsletter, follow us @economics and subscribe to our podcast. China’s inflation risks are building while new Covid-19 outbreaks are dimming the outlook for economic growth, throwing the spotlight back on policy makers as the Communist Party’s top leaders gather for a crucial political meeting this week. […]
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