The market rallied strongly yesterday; I guess that shouldn’t have been too much of a surprise, since investors are apparently so fearful of the prospect of what an extended escalation of the trade war that the entire market seems to be hanging on every tweet or sound bite that comes from the White House or […]
Read MoreIt seems that the only news anybody really cares about right now is the trade war. China announced yesterday that it would impose $60 billion of retaliatory tariffs against the U.S. after the Trump administration increased already imposed duties from 10% to 25% at the end of last week. That has propelled the market to […]
Read MoreFriday at 12:00 a.m., the Trump administration followed through on its threat to increase tariffs against China from 10% to 25%. Experts and pundits, including corporate heads, politicians, and economists seem united in the opinion that this latest phase of the trade war will be felt more acutely on the consumer level. The consensus seems […]
Read MoreAt the beginning of 2018, I ran a complete analysis of Bed Bath & Beyond (BBBY), a stock that I’ve followed for some time, and used in the past for some of my own value-oriented investments. The stock has been in an extended, long-term downward trend dating back to the first quarter of 2015. That […]
Read MoreThe market has been set on increasingly uncertain footing in the last two days as all of us try to figure out how the week is going to end between the U.S. and China and tariffs. The Trump administration continues to hold to their story that China reneged on previous agreements, but investors and analysts […]
Read MoreI started out this week looking for stocks that are currently bucking the overall market’s bullish tone and trend right now. That’s a deliberately contrarian viewpoint that works off of the simple idea that stocks that are trading at or near low extremes offer a better bargain proposition than those that are surging to new […]
Read MoreWithin the scope of long-term investing, there are two primary methods most of us use: investing for growth, or looking for value. I write a lot in this space about value-oriented investing, because more than two decades of study and hard experience have taught me that it is the investing method that suits me best. […]
Read MoreOne of the elements that I’ve come to rely on as a value investor to identify good bargains in the stock market is to look for fundamentally strong stocks that are trading at the lower end of their historical ranges. That’s a technical addition to the value-oriented investing system I’ve built over years of study […]
Read MoreLike most sectors in the market this year, the Basic Materials sector has seen a sizable move to the upside. As measured by the S&P 500 Materials Sector SPDR ETF (XLB), the sector is up a little over 11% since the beginning of the year. This is a sector that operates with a fairly high […]
Read MoreOne of the most basic principles of technical analysis is the identification of trends. Trends can last very short periods of time of just a few weeks at a time, or they can extend into several months or even into years. One of the most important elements of trend analysis is the simple fact that […]
Read MoreAs the market pushes to a new set of all-time highs, more and more analysts seem inclined to shrug aside the volatility and uncertainty that defined practically all of 2018. In fact, the market has reclaimed all of the decline that pushed the market nearly to bear market levels. Most of the indicators of the […]
Read MoreA month ago, investors were put on edge by a rarely occurring phenomenon that most analysts, myself included, tend to view as a strong indication of a recessionary downturn. The spread between 3-month Treasury bills and 10-year Treasury bonds inverted, as the 3-month yield moved above the 10-year yield. It doesn’t happen very often, and […]
Read MoreIs the market’s recent surge to a new all-time high a fresh continuation signal of the long-term bull market that many thought had ended in the last quarter of 2018? It could be; the truth is that the market right now is anxious for a positive catalyst. GDP numbers released Friday morning indicated that national […]
Read MoreAnybody that follows the market with any kind of regularity knows who Jim Cramer is. After establishing a solid reputation as a money manager running his own hedge fund in the 1990’s, where he gained fame by posting only a single year of negative returns, Cramer retired from money management in 2001 and began running […]
Read MoreAre you old enough to remember the cola taste-test commercials from the 1980’s? Average people were blindfolded, and then given nondescript cups of Coco-Cola and Pepsi and asked to taste each one and identify the one they preferred. It was a great gimmick, setting off debates among youth and adults alike about which of the […]
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