The recent shift in Fed rhetoric … does it really mark a policy shift? Market history update Bad News Sells! Randall Forsyth, Barron’s editorial writer and chief contributor to the “Up and Down Wall Street” column, is a modern day “Mikey.” You all remember Mikey? He was a 3 or 4-year-old toddler featured…
Tag: Federal Reserve
How to embrace awful turns in good markets
Lose your ‘recency bias.’ Tune out the ‘nattering nabobs of negativism,’ i.e. the media. Don’t confuse market melt-downs, due to poor market mechanics, with the end of the world. Lose your ‘recency bias’ especially as it pertains to past market trauma Definition “The tendency to think that what’s been happening lately will keep happening is one…
The “Christmas Eve Massacre” and where we stand now
First and Foremost … By early October, 2018, the S&P 500 had more than quadrupled off its 666, 2009 secular bear market low (up over 300%). This was capped off by a spectacular 24 month run that saw the S&P 500 increase more than 50% to a new all-time-high of 2951.81 (10/3/18). I would say a correction of…
A Look Into The Belly Of The Bear
Irrational Pessimism Before moving on to a more complete discussion of ‘the belly of the bear’, I thought a real-time view of ‘irrational pessimism’ might be in order. I have one and it is a doozy. Now a ‘doozy’, loosely defined, is “something unique.” Unfortunately, or fortunately for those left with money to buy, there…
Ladies and Gentlemen we have a Black Swan–Version 2.0
Late the evening of November 8, 2016 I wrote a post “Ladies and Gentlemen we have a Black Swan.” The Black Swan (unexpected, very rare) was the surprise election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States. This was before the final tally of the vote was in. You may read the entire post…
Jeffrey Gundlach — S&P 500 headed to new lows
CNBC felt Gundlach’s commentary to be so valuable, so prescient that they ran this banner headline, “Jeffrey Gundlach says the S&P 500 is headed to new lows: ‘I’m pretty sure this is a bear market’”, two days in a row. BTW we are already very close to the S&P’s low of the year. A break to…
A ‘Bad Trip’ Down Memory Lane
The ‘bad trip’ I’m alluding to in my title was the type some substance experimenters used to get from self-administered hallucinogenic drugs like LSD (Lysergic Acid Diethylamide). This was the preferred trip-inducing substance of Harvard psychology professor Dr. Timothy Leary who thought it might have great potential in psychotherapy. “He used LSD himself and developed…
The beginning of the end
Or, is it the end of the beginning? Or, is it, as stated in the eloquent and somewhat humorous words of Sir Winston Churchill, ” … not the end. This is not even the beginning the end. But is perhaps the end of the beginning.” This line was delivered to the attendees at the Lord…
“These are the times that try men’s souls”
Thank you Thomas Paine and CNBC contributors Fred Imbert and Ryan Browne for the title and inspiration for this post. Paine’s pamphlet “The American Crisis” penned during the Revolutionary War, did indeed reflect dire times in our history. Meanwhile, CNBC’s post-market post (Dow drops 200 points on worries about global economic growth–11/9/18) reflected on potential dire times in…
Panic City & Cramer’s Revisionist Market History
“I love the smell of napalm in the morning” … Robert Duval as gung-ho, Lt. Colonel Kilgore in Francis Ford Coppola’s classic Vietnam film, “Apocalypse Now.“ In Kilgore’s case it was the “smell of victory” … not so for the market. Since Monday (10/8) it was napalm morning, noon and night for US equities, burning…