If anyone remembers the Market Sector Cycle that goes through the market ‘seasons’ – early expansion, late expansion, early contraction to late contraction and so on – then why don’t we see much of it these days? Well, probably because like all ‘economic’ theories, once they’re discovered they don’t work anymore – but also because…
The best description I’ve heard of a bank is “someone who will lend you an umbrella, but if it starts to rain they’ll want it back”. Pretty accurate. I’ve not touched banking stocks in April 2007. After the credit crisis I remarked, as regular readers may know, that there would be no point investing in…
Last time I wrote about Lockheed Martin (NYSE:LMT) it was in my magazine article “War! What Is It Good For? Absolutely Your Pension” back in the early summer. My point being that if you don’t have a defence element to your portfolio, then you don’t really have a pension. The stock was $205.13 then and…
So a fairly predictable overshoot in Crude Light, past the $35 I was expecting to $30. I read today that it is estimated Libya lost $68bn in oil revenues thanks to their political instability. We can only wonder how low oil might have been during recent months had they been producing normally. If I were…
In my last post I looked at the Dow Jones. The US economy and markets are stronger than the UK. The important thing about the market there is that it has not reached the level to be termed a Bear Market. The FTSE 100, however, has. It pushed through that level and closed below it…
It is so easy to fall into the trap of getting it right a few times, and then thinking you can tell the markets what to do. Well, in the short term, if you have the luxury of piles of money, you can influence the markets, but it’s always going to be short-lived for any…
As seen in the January edition of Master Investor Magazine. One of the unfortunate things about 24 hour news is it goes on for 24 hours and has to be filled with something. The news tends to come from places where the news networks have a crew, and that are emotive to the viewing public…
I’m always sceptical when I see headlines like the one on the Beeb website Business section today: “FTSE 100 Soars 2%”. It’s less than that now, as the market softened since that report went live. It’s more like 1.5% as I write. You can hardly say it’s soaring when the ATR (Average True Range) is…
Whenever you say ‘short cable’ some joker will say “actually, Vince Cable is quite tall”. It may be time to follow the electorate, though, who shorted Cable in his Twickenham constituency in the General Election this year and short cable (£:$). Arbitrage is a big deal in trading and any sort of speculative endeavour. As…
RBS has issued a warning that the coming year is not about return on capital, but return of capital. Should you listen to a bank that so monumentally cocked up that they are now really Royal Bank of England, having been bailed out by the government? There were very serious errors of judgement as they…
