Crowd of people gather outside the New York Stock Exchange following the Crash of 1929. They say those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. As a student of market history, I’ve seen that maxim made true time and again. The cycle swings fear back to greed. The overcautious become the…
Taper or no taper? When? How much? These are the worries that are currently driving tensions in the stock market on a daily basis. As I wrote in a previous article, no one seems to care that corporate revenue growth is muted and consumers aren’t spending. Last week, we saw jobs market data that helps…
Risers: Lloyds Banking Group +0.98% Lloyds has today announced that 109 million shares in St. James’s Place have been placed at 630p each, raising £680m. The bank, which is 33% owned by the Government, said they are to sell their remaining 21% stake in the wealth manager in a move that will increase the bank’s…
And so it was that I came to be in this strange hybrid of groundhog day and what appeared to be a parallel universe… Everything sure looked the same – the landscape, the sky, my house… But still, there was something troubling me. I rubbed my eyes profusely to make sure I was not seeing…
Let me begin by first stating this: I’m not going to talk about the Federal Reserve in any detail, or about the holiday shopping season and how it’s so important to the retail sector and the economy because these don’t seem to be of any great concern to the markets. The reality is that both…
From the Kitco site One the two reports compiled by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission reviewing weekly trading positions shows large speculative traders cut their bullish gold futures and options holdings to the smallest ever, according to data released late Friday. In the Dec. 3 commitments of traders disaggregated report, these traders narrowed their net-long…
I make no secret of my view (and in something of a contrast to other blog sites and fellow writers here) that AIM stocks represent the most interesting area of the London stock market. Of course there is always the ever present “excitement” of corporate governance “mines” that gives rise to the opinion that investors…
The traditionally quiet period for markets in December is turning out to be not-so-quiet, thanks to a key meeting of the U.S. Federal Reserve starting December 17. The meeting will decide on whether a reduction in quantitative easing (QE) is necessary. Consequently, every economic data point up to the meeting is being analysed and over-analysed.…
The chart below came my way this weekend and it paints a pretty bullish picture (Zak Mir will be pleased to hear given his blog here – http://www.spreadbetmagazine.com/blog/zak-mir-on-the-two-crudes-wti-brent.html What we can see is a large pennant formation that has been 5 years in the making and that broke to the upside in July. The decision…
Stocks look to open positively this morning here in London, taking their cue from a continuation of Friday’s late rally. Asian bourses, too, are closing out their sessions higher, with better-than-estimated Chinese exports compounding investors demand for risk following the positive jobs number. Shipments rose 12.7 per cent from a year earlier. Eurozone Q3 GDP…
