Financial News

A short interview with Jeremy Siegel by Robert Huebscher in Advisor Perspectives. Siegel touches on a number of interesting topics: The US stock market is fairly cheap at 16 times next year's earnings - as long as interest rates are around 3%. The volatility we've been seeing lately is...

Howard Gold had an article last week at Marketwatch: Why is the US stock market weak? Because the economy is too strong. What does it mean for the economy to be "too strong"? Isn't growth supposed to be good for stocks? Gold's reasoning is that Fed tightening is driving up the...

I am not a fan of bitcoin and the myriad other cryptocurrencies. No, I'm sorry if you bought the hype, but these things have no intrinsic value and they are not currencies. Not now and not in the future, at least not in their current form. Governments are not...

One of the things I've been pondering lately is the possibility that we are in the midst of a regime shift. I'm not talking about a cyclical change but rather a long term, secular one. For all of my investing career - and for almost everyone's entire investing life...

Stocks have stumbled into October with the S&P 500 down about 6% as I write this. The source of equity investors' angst is always hard to pinpoint and this is no exception but this correction doesn't seem to be due to concerns about economic growth. At least not directly. The...

Elon Musk's lack of self control has finally bought Tesla a real problem. Does Tesla survive without Musk? That's a harder question to answer than it seems at first blush. The stock price is intimately intertwined with the aura of Elon Musk. Without him, Tesla is just a money...

The headline says up 4.5% but that was almost entirely due to a surge in aircraft orders. Ex-transportation, orders were up just 0.1% and core capital goods were down after three straight up months. Read the rest at Econoday  

The EU Commission's measure of economic sentiment (ESI) continued to edge down in September. At 110.9, the index was 0.7 points short of its unrevised August reading and at its lowest level since June last year. The gauge has fallen every month so far in 2018. Read the rest at...

I have been a fan of Japan as an investment for quite a while now. Shinzo Abe's economic reforms are, for now, paying large dividends. There are questions of course about monetary policy as implemented by the inventors of Quantitative Easing, taking monetary policy where it has rarely been....

Japan's stock market hasn't done much this year - the Nikkei is up about 4% YTD - but you can't blame that on poor corporate earnings growth. Earnings for the Nikkei are up about 30% year over year and profit margins are hitting new highs (from the FT): Shinzo Abe...