ONE-TWENTY TWO: Trading Financial Markets
Exploring the poetry in financial markets for students of money and economy since the year 2000.
(This is an excerpt from an article I originally published on Seeking Alpha on March 28, 2016. Click here to read the entire piece.) Last December, I wrote about the shaky prospects for the seasonal trade on home builders. Sure enough, iShares US Home Construction (ITB) has not performed this badly on an absolute or … Read more
The February 4, 2016 edition of Nightly Business Report included a segment assessing the ability of the stock market to predict recessions. This is of course a timely piece given the stock market’s current plunge and growing recession fears arising from analyst commentary and softening economic data. Steve Liesman, chief economist for CNBC, took a … Read more
(This is an excerpt from an article I originally published on Seeking Alpha on September 24, 2015. Click here to read the entire piece.) {snip} After reading the actual speech by Andrew Haldane, titled ominously “How low can you go?,” I realized that the BBC had overly focused Haldane’s concluding remarks. I can understand the … Read more
Every time oil drops these days, I notice hand-wringing about whether the fall indicates a recession is somewhere close on the horizon. There is an intuitive appeal to this assumption. Oil is still an engine of economic activity, so declining prices must indicate falling demand. What seems to be “different” this time is a true … Read more
On November 7, 2011, Lakshman Achuthan of the Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI) appeared on CNBC again to talk about recession. Achuthan was very adamant in his insistence that the business cycle simply could not be reversed from its downward course. The talking points almost sounded like a campaign. It included precious gems like “divergence … Read more