A year that started with a bust sure does look like it will end with a bang. The major indices have been in a party mode since Election Day while the Russell 2000 specifically has been the life of the party. The gains have been...
Out with the old and in with the new. It happens every year with the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) and the regional bank presidents who have a vote on that committee. The turnover occurs January 1...
It's the stock market's world right now and the rest of us are just living in it. That world is filled with anticipation of faster economic growth, stronger earnings growth, and higher inflation. That perspective has taken over on the other side of the election and it is clear...
Can this bullish bias be maintained? The short answer is yes, but there is an asterisk attached to it. The rationale for an overall positive bias into year end boils down in our estimation to the following factors: With the election uncertainty removed, the market's focus will shift...
November 8, 2016, may not be a day that lives in infamy, yet the path to that day—Election Day—sure has been an infamous one. The presidential campaign has been reality TV at its finest—and that's not a compliment.
Hillary Clinton is going to win the presidential election. That is the conventional wisdom these days anyway, which has been forged by a series of polls skewing in favor of Mrs. Clinton beyond the reported margins of error.
The US Dollar Index includes six component currencies. It's a six-pack with some added kick to it these days, too, seeing how the US Dollar Index has been surging since early October and is trading at eight-month highs.
A lot of things happen in the last half of October every year. Leaves fall from the trees; temperatures drop, and a Major League team are on its way to becoming the World Series champion. Something else that unfolds in the last half of...
Presidential candidate Donald Trump has accused the Federal Reserve ("Fed") of being completely political with its monetary policy. A calm and very diplomatic Janet Yellen, who is chairman of the Federal Reserve, says the Fed is...
It happened again this past week—and no, we're not talking about OPEC's lip service toward a production cap agreement or the specter of a banking crisis cropping up with doubts surrounding Deutsche Bank's capital position.
Fed Chair Janet Yellen recently said that the Federal Reserve is "generally pleased" with the US economy. She did so at the same time she was noting for listeners that the Fed's median projection for the change in real GDP for both...
I had another topic planned for this week's column, but then North Korea had to go and conduct an underground nuclear test—literally and figuratively. I'm concerned about the ramifications of that test in general, but what concerns me more...
What goes up must come down. That's what Sir Isaac Newton suggested anyway in his Universal Law of Gravity. It is easy to think in watching the stock market since the end of June, however, that it does not adhere to the law of gravity.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500, and the Nasdaq Composite have all risen to new record highs. It has been a laudable development considering the macro backdrop is still dropping a lot of disappointment on the world.
Something stood out in the economic data this past week and we're not talking about the standout employment report for July. We'll get to that in a bit. The thing that stood out to us was found in the Personal Income and Spending report for June.
Albert Einstein introduced his Theory of General Relativity in 1915. His finding, according to a helpful Space.com article, was that massive objects cause a distortion in space-time, which is felt as gravity.
How low can you go? It is a question that gets asked often in a limbo dance contest. These days it is a question that gets asked often with respect to sovereign bond rates. In the past, it would have been thought that zero would be as low as...
That thing that wasn't supposed to happen has happened. A majority of voters in the UK voted in favor of leaving the European Union. It was an historic decision, the full implications of which are unknown and won't be known for years.
It has been a long, winding road basically to nowhere this year. At its low in February, the S&P 500 was down 11.4% for the year. At its high earlier this month, the S&P 500 was up 3.8% for the year and less than 1.0% shy of a new all-time high.
The S&P 500 is up 3.5% year-to-date.* Over the last three months, however, it is up 6.3%. Simply put, three months and a day ago, things didn't look as good as they appear to look now. Lately, it seems as if the stock market does nothing...
