Insights

Since 1982 bonds have been in a long, strong bull market, coinciding with the stock bull market until 2000 and outperforming stocks since. In fact, from 1982 long-term treasury bonds returned over 11% per year, within a fraction of the return on stocks but with far,...

Which is the best performing mutual fund over the last 3-4 months - S&P 500 Index Fund, Harbor International Stock Fund (mainly Europe) or Thornburg Developing Markets Fund (international emerging markets)? Since early June, the emerging markets fund has returned...

Europe, which was down about a half percent yesterday is down about 1.5% today after Spain reported a deepending recession and said it would likely miss its deficit targets. The US markets look to open down about 1% today. We had a late day rally yesterday to barely...

Ben Bernanke will apparently end his tenure as chairman of the Federal Reserve in Jan. 2014 when his current term runs out, says the NY Times, quoting Bernanke's friends. Of course, should Romney win (which I doubt) he has said he would fire Helicopter Ben. Bernanke...

Google reported earnings and revenues today and missed big on both. According to Dan Niles at AlphaOne Partners, Google has two problems. 1) More search is being done on tablets and phones with smaller screens and less ad space 2) The buy of Motorola earlier this year...

Housing starts for September were reported today as up 15%. That's a welcome number, albeit from a very low base. Why now? Well, it doesn't have nearly as much to do with record low interest rates as other factors. 1) Extremely low housing inventory, especially on new...

It was nice to see some follow-through on yesterday's rally. We are 12 points below a level the market hit twice before and backed away. A break though 1465 by at least a few points, say to 1470 would likely set up a nice move higher, just going by standard technical...

I wrote recently that housing was improving. Today we got a better than expected retail sales number, mainly driven by higher car sales. The main things troubling U.S. investors are a likely decline in earnings this reporting period and the fear over the "fiscal...

I mentioned the other day that I do consulting to businesses on improving their 401(k) plans and reducing business owner and executive fiduciary liability tied to sponsoring a 401(k) Plan. I also work with individual participants to manage their 401(k) accounts. Many...

Many people, including me have been writing that the jobs number reported last week and the surprisingly low new unemployment claims number reported this morning were too good to be true. In the last couple days here and in my October newsletter I partially explained...