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December 22, 2024 | Larry’s Commentary
Wednesday’s brutal response to a mildly hawkish Federal Reserve rate announcement triggered two opposite market signals. First, the sell-off told us that the great secular bull market that began in 2009 is over. Second, the extraordinarily intense selling generated oversold readings that were bound to produce a short-covering rally, as they indeed have. The stock […]
December 15, 2024 | Which Will Crash First: Stocks or Bitcoin?
I’ll trash bitcoin in a moment — my new hobby — but first a yellow alert for everyone who thinks the stock market’s inevitable collapse is most likely to happen shortly after the first of the year. Although that seems quite plausible, fulfilling popular expectations is not how Mr Market usually works. Think how many […]
December 8, 2024 | The Herd Is Even More Fearless than in 1929
Skittish about the stock market’s manic climb? Consider moving some of your savings into T-bills, which are currently yielding around 4.25%. You could do worse. Some of my friends are reluctant to take even a little money off the table because 2024 was such an incredible year for them. One is a retired lawyer who […]
December 1, 2024 | Cut $2 Trillion from the U.S. Budget…or What?
Let’s hope Musk and Ramaswamy have been paying close attention to David Stockman’s ten-part series on how to cut the U.S. budget before America spends its way into bankruptcy. Stockman was Reagan’s budget director in 1981-85 and is eminently qualified to spell out the tough reforms needed to force the U.S. to live within its means. He […]
November 24, 2024 | Let’s Execute a Few Internet Scammers!
Have you heard from “Cleo Kenmille” or “Caroline Johnson”? If not, consider yourself fortunate. Those are pseudonyms used by a crew of shitbags who work out of bucket shops that lie beyond the reach of international law. Their job is to steal money from you or anyone else who is familiar with PayPal, the online […]
November 17, 2024 | The King of Bullshit Money
Bitcoin: The shysters who sold me bitoin KNEW it would come back. That’s because they made such a ‘generous’ offer to make all the losers whole. Sure, the payoff was in bullshot coin that would need a huge recovery in BTC just to become convertible into less-bullshit coin. BUt they hung in there. And the […]
November 10, 2024 | What If It Really Is Morning in America?
I’ve been confidently anticipating the Mother of All Tops since, like, around 1975, but this week I decided to go wholeheartedly with the flow. The result, technically speaking, is a robustly optimistic S&P target at 7644.50. This might not be what permabears want to hear, but it will leave bulls sufficient room to deal with […]
November 3, 2024 | A Canny Silver Bull Trades Ingots for T-Bonds
[The author of this week’s commentary is an old friend who worked his way up from exchange-floor clerk to commercial real estate mogul over the time I’ve known him. He has demonstrated remarkable timing, courage and patience as an investor, buying commercial real estate at the bottom of the 2007-08 crash and holding it until […]
October 27, 2024 | An Election Week Scenario
You can always tell when portfolio managers are hard at play, immersed in an epic circle jerk that has become more tediously familiar with each passing week. And so it went on Friday, as money migrated for no discernible reason from certain, temporarily disfavored stocks to flavor-of-the-day hotties. It seemed almost as though the chimpanzees […]
October 20, 2024 | Investors Go All-In for Trump
Wall Street has gone all-in for Trump, piling up such extravagant gains in the last few weeks that one might wonder what bold miracles investors expect of him. More likely, unfortunately, is that within a year or two of taking office, he will be overwhelmed by the collapse of a financial bubble that required only […]
October 13, 2024 | Kamala Unwinding
[I can’t stomach news reports that take Kamala Harris’s candidacy seriously, especially articles suggesting with brazen implausibility that she is polling dead-even with Trump in some important swing states. Fortunately for those creeped out by all the tilted campaign coverage, my colleague James Howard Kunstler has compressed everything you need to know about the election into a […]
October 6, 2024 | Stocks Act Fearless as Oil Price Soars
If you can keep a cool head while everyone around you is panicking, perhaps you don’t understand the situation. That’s what they say, anyway. It is exactly what we saw last week when stocks barely shrugged even as the shooting war in the Middle East took another baby step toward nuclear conflagration. The oil markets […]
September 29, 2024 | Levitating Kamala
Expect stocks to continue their heedless waft into outer space until the election. They would not likely do so if investors even remotely imagined Kamala Harris might win. James Kunstler provided the most succinct reason we’ve heard for why this is not going to happen: “The people in this land are finally sick of a […]
September 22, 2024 | Sell the News
The stock market went bonkers following the Fed’s first rate-cut since March 2020, but it’s more than a little tempting to sell the news. A return to easing had been rumored for the last couple of years, but with a pitchfork mob threatening to descend on the Eccles Building, Fed Chairman Powell finally gave in […]
September 15, 2024 | The ‘Wealth Effect’ Is a Delusion and a Fraud
The so-called ‘wealth effect’ is the Tulipmania of this era on steroids, creating untold sums of money from speculative spume. If materializing vast quantities of spendable cash is the goal, a revved-up wealth effect makes the Fed Open Market Committee look like a ladies’ luncheon club. Indeed, it can take long months or even years […]
September 8, 2024 | Our #1 Bellwether Is at Cliff’s Edge
I continue to believe the bull market’s fate can be divined simply by paying close attention to price action in Microsoft shares. The company is not only the second-largest in the world by capitalization, slightly behind Apple; it is also the most important. That’s because its huge stream of revenues is all but impervious to […]
August 18, 2024 | Time for a Holiday…
[I’m taking a summer break, so this will be my last commentary until after Labor Day. It will be the usual busman’s holiday for me, however, and actionable ‘touts’ for popular symbols will be updated ‘round-the-clock as always. Some recommendations will be accessible to non-paying subscribers, so be sure to check the home page regularly, especially if […]
August 4, 2024 | Time for a Holiday…
[I’m taking a summer break, so this will be my last commentary until after Labor Day. It will be the usual busman’s holiday, however, and actionable ‘touts’ for popular symbols will be updated ‘round-the-clock as always. Some recommendations will be accessible to non-paying subscribers, so be sure to check the home page regularly, especially if stocks go […]
July 28, 2024 | Time for a Holiday…
[I’m taking a summer break, so this will be my last commentary until after Labor Day. It will be the usual busman’s holiday, however, and actionable ‘touts’ for popular symbols will be updated ‘round-the-clock as always. Some recommendations will be accessible to non-paying subscribers, so be sure to check the home page regularly, especially if stocks go […]
July 21, 2024 | Big Selloff Was Tightly Scripted
Bears shouldn’t get their hopes too high just because the S&P 500 plummeted for three straight days last week. The selloff seemed tightly scripted, given that the Dow Industrials were rising just as sharply at least part of that time. This is shown in the chart above, which captures price action on Thursday. The implication […]
July 14, 2024 | Summer Doldrums It Ain’t
The dog days of summer have returned with a vengeance to Florida this year, especially in my home. The air conditioner’s condenser coil sprang a leak, which is hardly unusual considering that it’s eight years old. What is unusual, and causing more than a little inconvenience, is that the broken part will take a month […]
July 7, 2024 | Nostalgic for Summer Doldrums?
The dog days of summer have returned with a vengeance to Florida this year, especially in my home. The air conditioner’s condenser coil sprang a leak, which is hardly unusual considering that it’s eight years old. What is unusual, and causing more than a little inconvenience, is that the broken part will take a month […]
June 30, 2024 | Dollar Derangement Syndrome
Of all the markets tracked by Rick’s Picks, the dollar arguably has been the most interesting. This might seem paradoxical, given the relatively placid look of the Dollar Index chart above. Although there has been moderate turbulence since early last year, the overall impression is of a transoceanic flight cruising within a vertical range of several […]
June 23, 2024 | ‘Strong Economy’ Is a Dirty Lie
The disconnect between tight Fed policy and a U.S. economy on the brink of recession is growing more unsettling every day. A key question is which economy we are talking about, since there are two distinctly different ones that Fed actions can affect. The first is the economy of consumer goods and services. It is […]
June 16, 2024 | Short Squeeze Blows the Roof Off Stocks
Last week’s rabid short-squeeze punctured bull-market targets I’ve been drum-rolling for months in Microsoft, Apple and QQQ. Moreover, the bullish look of the S&P 500 chart shown above is so clear and compelling that even the most stubborn permabears will need to make room for more upside to at least 6118, a nearly 13% rally […]