» 2012 » January

Even though the Dow was down a whopping 6 points today and the equity market showed a lot of resilience rebounding off session lows there is more to the story. Biggest news today is that of US Treasuries which continue breaking out to all time highs across the entire yield curve. Additionally the en...

Gold is enjoying an awesome January, rallying strongly out of its oversold late-December lows.  But last month’s hyper-pessimistic sentiment deserves some reflection before it totally fades from memory.  One of the core theses of the bears resolutely predicting sub-$1400 gold prices soon was the...

Trading using technical indicators — such as the MACD, for example — can do one of two things: help you or hurt you.  Technical indicators are those fancy computerized studies that you frequently see at the bottom of price charts that are supposed to tell you what the market is going to...

One of Thursday’s stories on CNBC.com had to do with some pros getting out of stocks because sentiment is becoming too bullish. Bullish sentiment can be a sign that an important market top could be lurking just around the corner, so let’s look at one of our sentiment charts to see how bu...

Today was another battle in the war between US Treasuries (UST) and equity. Both continue to try and breakout and move higher, something that is simply not sustainable. Let me rephrase that it is sustainable to an extent. That was the case over the past five months. After a breakout to all time hig...

I don’t believe this market is going to come to a specific level and reverse giving an all clear signal to go short and or exit longs. The basis for that statement is in late July 2011 the market experienced a minor pullback off no major technical level that quickly turned into a major decline of ...

There has been a deluge of articles recently about the upticks in the housing data.  The consensus is that these data points are surely pointing , finally, to a bottom in the depressing decline of real estate.  Let me acknowledge that I do not dispute the improvement in the data regarding home sta...

As I was writing this past weekend’s newsletter “A Technical Review Of The Markets” it really dawned on me just how complacent investors have become on the economy, the markets and risk in general.  The mainstream media, and most of analysts, are looking at recent improvements i...

There are a lot of happy bulls out there right now with a level of complacency I don’t think I have ever seen. What I do find comical is many of these bullish individuals are claiming that credit is wrong here or the US has decoupled from various currencies pairs, etc. Where the comedy comes in th...

One of the interesting things about being in Hong Kong is that I get to see the weekend edition of the Financial Times 12 hours early. And the headlines were not all that pleasant. As I promised last week, we will cast our eyes to Europe and ponder what is in store for Europe for the year and the ...

I have not posted a skew chart in quite a while. Admittedly it was getting difficult to draw conclusions from some of the wild price action. That was until the past few days when the skew literally shot out of a cannon. While the vix remains in a descending wedge and narrowing in daily price fluctua...

If investing seems harder than it used to, you’re not imagining things. U.S. stocks are down from a decade ago, the gold/silver miners haven’t kept up with the underlying metals, and though Treasury bonds have done pretty well, only a lunatic would count on them going forward. And now that MF Gl...