ONE-TWENTY TWO: Trading Financial Markets
Exploring the poetry in financial markets for students of money and economy since the year 2000.
It took almost a month, but silver has finally joined gold in its post-Fed breakout. The chart below shows that silver has broken above stiff resistance at the 50-day moving average (DMA). This resistance has kept silver under a lid for five months. Source: StockCharts.com With the Federal Reserve promising to keep rates low through … Read more
(This is an excerpt from an article I originally published on Seeking Alpha on February 7, 2012. Click here to read the entire piece.) Many rare earth element stocks have taken on new life in 2012 as investors and traders have scrambled to speculate on some of 2011’s poor-performing stocks. The current run-up has been … Read more
(This is an excerpt from an article I originally published on Seeking Alpha on January 26, 2012. Click here to read the entire piece.) Last week, I wrote about the opportunities arising from the crash in natural gas prices. On the morning of January 24, CSX Corporation, a railroad company, provided timely commentary on natural … Read more
The current extended overbought period has produced many amazing chart patterns. In this chart review, I am highlighting some charts I find particularly interesting and compelling. There are impressive recoveries, stocks dancing with critical resistance, and emerging breakouts. Some charts are quite telling in that they completely contradict the presumed economic disaster from an imminent … Read more
(This is an excerpt from an article I originally published on Seeking Alpha on January 22, 2012. Click here to read the entire piece.) Via an extremely strong Japanese yen, the world is offering Japan a steep discount on its assets. On January 19, 2011, Japanese Finance Minister, Yukio Edano, seemed to indicate that Japan … Read more
(This is an excerpt from an article I originally published on Seeking Alpha on January 17, 2012. Click here to read the entire piece.) Last year I wrote a two-part series leveraging the work of Jeremy Grantham to develop a strategy for profiting from a crash in commodity prices (see “Profiting from Physical Assets in … Read more
This is an excerpt from an article I originally published on Seeking Alpha on January 1, 2012. Click here to read the entire piece.) In my last post updating the current list of buy candidates for the “commodity crash” portfolio, I neglected to include fertilizer stocks. Phosphate and potash producers – like Mosaic (MOS), Potash … Read more
This is an excerpt from an article I originally published on Seeking Alpha on December 29, 2011. Click here to read the entire piece.) On August 15th, Mark Smith, the President and CEO of rare earth producer Molycorp (MCP) made one of the strangest insider purchases I have ever observed. {snip} Two weeks ago, on … Read more
This is an excerpt from an article I originally published on Seeking Alpha on December 28, 2011. Click here to read the entire piece.) The Federal Reserve’s second phase of quantitative easing (QE2) is slowly becoming a distant memory…{snip} The stark contrast between winning and losing stocks (S&P 500 index versus many commodity stocks) leaves … Read more
This is an excerpt from an article I originally published on Seeking Alpha on December 20, 2011. Click here to read the entire piece.) Last week, Joy Global (JOY) reported its fourth quarter and 2011 operating results and provided some valuable details on the outlook for commodities in 2012. JOY blames inventory destocking for the … Read more