ALWAYS CONSULT YOUR INVESTMENT PROFESSIONAL BEFORE MAKING ANY INVESTMENT DECISION
August 20, 2023 | Thoughts on Rent, the Fed, and Bonds
[The following was sent out to clients in late July by my friend Doug Behnfield, a wealth manager and senior vice president at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management in Boulder, CO. Long-time followers of Rick’s Picks will be familiar with Doug’s work, since his thoughts have appeared here many times. I have always considered him not only one of […]
August 13, 2023 | T-Bond Plunge Ahead?
Is Mr. Market about to deliver the coup de grace to bond bulls? It certainly appears that way. They’ve been getting schmeissed regularly since a frightening few days back in March 2020. At the time, investors were struggling to decide how covid would affect their financial lives. The wild gyrations near the top, followed by the subsequent collapse of […]
August 6, 2023 | AAPL Takes the Lead…Lower
Last week’s commentary said the first big correction of 2023 had a ways to go, and that is still the case. If there were any doubts about this, Apple’s swan dive Thursday on punk Q2 earnings released after the close should have dispelled them. The most valuable stock in the world fell by nearly 5%, […]
July 30, 2023 | First Big Correction of 2023 Has a Ways to Go
My ‘Chipotle indicator’ suggests that CMG, along with other high-fliers and the broad averages, could fall by at least 27% from recent highs before the bull market resumes later this summer. We last visited the burrito vendor’s chart in early May, just after a short-squeeze powered by feverish buying speared the red line, a ‘midpoint […]
July 23, 2023 | A Few Trillion Here, a Few Trillion There…
Last week’s commentary predicted that rates on the Ten-Year Note, currently around 3.8%, will hit a minimum 5.5% before inflation lurches into reverse and the U.S. begins a hellish descent into a full-blown debt deflation. The following, insightful response came from our friend Richard Charles at Alpine Capital: Well done, Rick, for highlighting the crux of markets […]
July 16, 2023 | 5.5% Rate on T-Bonds Coming, but Then What?
Jim Grant, the financial word’s adult in the room, says the bear market in Treasury bonds could last for decades. Do the long-term charts bear him out? The one reproduced above suggests that it’s at least possible that we are in the early stages of such a move. Most immediately, the chart projects a further […]
July 9, 2023 | Few Big Winners in the Hard Times Ahead
Will the rich and powerful own everything when the global financial system collapses from too much debt? Supposedly, “they” have been plotting and preparing for this all along — even getting a new money system ready to make the takeover complete. But this theory makes no more sense than the one that puts the same evil geniuses […]
July 2, 2023 | What to Expect After an Endless ‘Fourth’
This promises to be the longest holiday ever celebrated in the U.S., eclipsing even the eight-day festival holidays that frequently pop up on the Jewish calendar. By the time you read this, the Independence Day celebration will be in its unofficial fourth day, having begun in spirit with a pronounced slowdown in the stock market […]
June 25, 2023 | We’ll Look Back Fondly on Inflation
Inflation is being crushed from the system by vastly larger forces of deflation that have been lurking for decades. Although we might have expected the trillions in funny money that were force-fed into the U.S. economy during the covid era to have a longer-lasting effect on prices, inflation never had much of a chance. With […]
June 18, 2023 | Frustrated Bear? Temporary Relief Is on the Way
When will the rampaging bull run out of steam? A good question, considering how Wall Street has been flouting a slew of good reasons for the broad averages to be at multiyear lows rather than revving up for a shot at new record highs. Two destructive juggernauts in particular are bearing down on the economy […]
June 11, 2023 | How Wall Street Thrives on Meaningless Data
The Biden Administration can count on Wall Street to celebrate meaningless economic data and bogus GDP growth with steep rallies, even as the visible economy continues to implode. It will become increasingly difficult to ignore signs of impending collapse, however, as anyone who lives in San Francisco could tell you. The city’s growing wretchedness is […]
June 4, 2023 | $AAPL – Apple Computer (Last:180.95)
The post-covid bull market begun in the final quarter of 2020 is running out of room, at least on the daily chart. The 184,86 target shown, a Hidden Pivot resistance, is not the highest that can be projected, but it still looks capable of restraining the charge, if only for a short while. Sliding ‘A’ down […]
May 28, 2023 | And Now Microsoft Leads the Stampede!
Microsoft’s bullish rampage last week added to already strong evidence that the stock market is headed to new records highs. The shares of the software leviathan’s shares not only jackhammered through granite resistance in the form of the midpoint ‘Hidden Pivot’ shown in the chart, they ended the week decisively above it. This technical telltale […]
May 21, 2023 | Did the Bear Rally Top on Friday?
Maybe. Yeah, right. A headline here just two weeks ago implied that stocks were about to go bananas: Why a Permabear Is Certain We’re Going Much Higher. Hubris aside, this was based on the very bullish chart of just one stock, Chipotle (CMG). It had just crossed the $2,000 threshold and appeared — still appears — […]
May 14, 2023 | Bond Bulls Seemed Just as Crazy in 1981
[Editor’s note: The following commentary draws parallels between today’s bond market environment and the last great bear market in bonds, which bottomed in 1981. It went out last month to clients of my friend Doug Behnfield, a financial advisor and senior vice president at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management in Boulder. Long-time followers of Rick’s Picks will be familiar with […]
May 7, 2023 | Why a Permabear Is Certain We’re Going Much Higher (II)
[I’m giving the commentary below a second week on the front page because the thesis is so outrageous even I can scarcely believe it. Stocks screamed higher to end the week, as if everything were right with the world. What lunacy! Investors have truly gone out of their minds. Reportedly, there are 186 U.S. banks on […]
April 30, 2023 | Why a Permabear Is Certain We’re Going Much Higher
Like many of my subscribers, I have been waiting for the stock market to crash so that sanity might have a chance to recover its footing in the investment world. Permabears can always come up with good reasons to explain why a crash is imminent. Some use technical tools for this. Others cite public and […]
April 23, 2023 | It’s All Good, Sort of…
Readers will be pleased to hear that Alissa Heinerscheid, the Anheuser-Busch marketing whiz responsible for featuring Dylan Mulvaney’s unwholesome mug on cans of Bud Light, appears to have lost her job. A-B reportedly put Heinerscheid on a leave of absence, replacing her with a senior executive. Since the megabrewer is unlikely to promote Alissa, and […]
April 16, 2023 | Spuds MacKenzie Is Rolling in His Grave
5 pm The toppy look of Anheuser-Busch’s stock chart (above) implies that the company is at least somewhat likely to lose sales because of its attempt to shove the wretchedly unlovely Dylan Mulvaney down our throats. Bud Light is undrinkable pisswater to begin with, so perhaps we should not be cheering on the frat boys […]
April 9, 2023 | Lawyers Have Much to Fear from AI Bots
Anyone who has played around with ChatGPT knows that it is just dumb enough to succeed wildly. It harbors no opinions, grudges or wit, and it can talk a blue streak without saying anything interesting or exceptionable. Artificial intelligence seems particularly well suited to mimicking the rote tasks that lawyers charge clients hundreds or even […]
April 2, 2023 | To Hell in a Handbasket
Well, they finally indicted the proverbial ham sandwich last week, adding to our long list of worries that the world really is falling apart. It’s as good a time as any to trot out William Butler Yeats’ The Second Coming as a reminder of where things are headed. This is arguably the most powerful poem in the English language, […]
March 19, 2023 | To Pivot, or Not to Pivot, That Is the Question
To pivot, or not to pivot? That is the question Fed Chairman Powell will have pondered over the weekend while tending chicken breasts, franks and burgers spaced meticulously on the grating of a 148,000 BTU grill. If conscience doth indeed make cowards of us all, we might expect him to act boldly. But how? Does […]
March 5, 2023 | Creating ‘Wealth’ Is 99% Inspiration and 1% Perspiration
Americans grew effortlessly richer last week when a two-day rally in stocks and bonds added many hundreds of billions of instantly spendable dollars to the economy. Most of it would have dropped into the hands of traders, speculators and portfolio managers. However, enough will trickle down to sales reps at Bijan, Dolce & Gabbana and […]
February 26, 2023 | Uranium’s Bull Market Has Barely Begun
Uranium investments topped the list of exciting takeaways from the Mines & Money conference held in Miami last week. Keynote speaker Chris Temple, editor of The National Investor, dispelled nagging doubts about atomic power’s future when he noted that Greta ‘How-dare-you!’ Thunberg has been distancing herself from fellow activists who remain vociferously opposed to nuclear energy. […]
February 19, 2023 | When the Bearish Case Looks Too Good
Get AAPL right and you get the stock market right. That has been our mantra for years, and it has never failed us. Apple shares and the broad averages are unlikely to go their separate ways because so many portfolio managers regard the stock as they do their Patek Phillipe wristwatches: something to pass on to […]