Insights

Stocks moved up first thing this morning but could not hold the gains and finished in the middle. Corporate and high yield bonds were higher, high quality bonds were lower. Oil was up almost 2% while gold had a small gain. In Europe, banks are cutting back on lending....

After 7 down days in a row, the market rallied yesterday on better than expected shopping news for the Thanksgiving weekend and Cyber Monday and news in Europe that the biggest countries were pushing for a closer fiscal union for the Eurozone (17 countries) and...

Sigh . . . another trading day, another down day and European troubles continue to worsen rapidly. I lightened up more on stocks today and have orders cued for Friday, Monday or a snap-back rally day. Traders are slowly selling everything except US treasuries right...

The US stock indexes could not quite get back to breakeven and spent a second day down a little, 0.4%. Europe was also down. The revised GDP estimate for 3Q 2011 came in at 2.0%, lower than the 2.5% original forecast and lower than expectations. The Fed minutes from...

I hear people talking about this being like the Fall of 2008. Let's go back and read selected (some slightly modified) headlines from 2008 from www.creditwritedowns.com/credit-crisis-timeline/  2008 03 14 JPMorgan and Fed Move to Bail Out Bear Stearns  2008 06 02...

An announcement you may not have heard this last Wed. may have a lot to do with how much we are going to pay at the pump. First, the worldwide price of oil is usually either quoted as the Brent Sea price (close by the U.K.) or WTI, meaning West Texas Intermediate as...

What could have been a good week in the US after several good economic reports was spoiled by worsening debt troubles in Europe. See my newsletter posted today for more details. For the week, the market lost 3%, high quality bonds lost 1.1%, gold lost 3%. The dollar...

I just uploaded the latest newsletter that I think you will find has both some interesting takes on the investment world right now and some good income ideas.

Today was a repeat of yesterday - good economic news on unemployment claims in the US, more bad news on European interest rates. Right now, European news wins, hands down. The major averages dropped about 1.5% give or take a little and it was not worse because of a...

While the economic news here is fairly good, the elephant in the room is the European debt markets. I will have much more on this in the newsletter. It has gotten delayed by my fall vacation and my back going out today. I am having trouble sitting today so it is...