Bitcoin Is Skyrocketing The biggest story of the day, which was on most investors’ minds, was the rally in bitcoin. The fact that this was such a major story even though most people in finance don’t have a large stake in the currency shows how remarkable the rally has been. As you can see from
Yield Curve Flattening The biggest story in finance, besides the hyperbolic rise in bitcoin, is the flattening of the yield curve. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the yield curve is flattening because it generally flattens during expansions. The two reasons why it is a big story are because investor
Inflation Picked Up The latest CPI report for October gives support to that prediction as we saw core CPI accelerate for the first time since January as you can see in the chart below. The CPI increased 0.1% month over month and 2% year over year. Core CPI was up 0.2% month over month and
Record Highs On Tuesday The stock market played to this year’s theme on Tuesday as the S P 500 hit 2,600 for the first time, rallying 0.65%. The Dow had its 60th record high of the year which is 4th most records since 1910. The Russell 2000 rose 1.03% and the VIX fell 8.64% to 9.73. Tech led the mar
Stocks Are Expensive The current market is expensive, but earnings momentum and global growth from the emerging markets are keeping the stock market up. The time the expansion has left is dwindling as the yield curve has been flattening lately. However, the last couple years of gains in a bull marke
Bitcoin Getting Larger But Not Safer In a previous article it was mentioned that with the recent excessive speculation in bitcoin, that bitcoin’s volatility since has been increasing after it went through a stretch of relative calmness. This aspect is important to review because in the past few year
New Sentiment Indicator It’s always interesting to see new metrics which attempt to give added insight. We have the consumer confidence index, the estimate on how much consumers plan to spend on Christmas gifts, and the consumer’s opinion on where the stock market will be in the next year. All three
Junk Bonds’ Recent Trading On Friday, the small caps outperformed the mega caps as the Russell 2000 - RUT was up 0.40%, while the Dow was down 0.43%. In the midst of this middling action, the JNK high yield bond index was down 0.05% and the HYG high yield bond index was down 0.03%. The
Economy Growing At Potential The chart below is a unique perspective on the economy which isn’t discussed much. It shows the real GDP in relation to the potential GDP. It looks at productivity growth to give you an idea of where the economy is relative to where it can be. Even though GDP growth per
Actually Returns Are Good When Fund Managers Are Taking Risk In a previous article, I showed the chart below without the 3 year forward S P 500 returns. Some bears were claiming the fact that fund managers are taking more risk than ever meant impending doom. As I mentioned, there have been times whe
