ALWAYS CONSULT YOUR INVESTMENT PROFESSIONAL BEFORE MAKING ANY INVESTMENT DECISION
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 […]
February 12, 2023 | Is the U.S. in a Recession or Not?
Only on Wall Street is fake news celebrated with such shameless hubris as we’ve seen lately. In the last few weeks, flouting a torrent of lousy corporate earnings reports, investors have gorged themselves on stocks. This resurgence, doomed by recession and a grim outlook for earnings, was supported mainly by fake, or at least […]
February 5, 2023 | Consumer Stimulus the Easy Way
Treat the stock market as you would a sleazy carnival game and you hold the key to accurately predicting its behavior. Take AAPL, for instance. We should have known that permabears were being set up for a fleecing when an always-complicit news media worked slavishly to stoke anticipation of horrendous Q4 earnings. Apple certainly didn’t […]
January 22, 2023 | Thin News Begets Thick Craziness
The chart is meant to put Friday’s giddy short-squeeze in perspective. If you are a bull and feeling a little discouraged by what you see, that is what I had intended. What better time to rack bears than in the final hours of a week that was more comic relief than hard news? Biden’s docugate […]
January 15, 2023 | Congress Outperformed S&P 500 in 2022
The headline explains why the voracious bounders on Capitol Hill are willing to spend so much time, money and effort getting re-elected. For they are not just investment insiders, they are recidivist sponsors of legislation that directly benefits their stock portfolios. It is quite a racket, and whatever laws exist to prevent them from getting […]
January 8, 2023 | What to Expect as Inflation Cools
[The following went out in mid-December to clients of Doug Behnfield, a Boulder-based wealth manager and senior vice president at Morgan Stanley. The letter provides an insightful view of the economic landscape as we enter the new year. Doug foresees falling stocks, falling inflation (or possibly modest deflation) and a continuing rally in long-term Treasurys. He is […]
January 2, 2023 | Beware If 2023 Gets Off to a Good Start
Be skeptical if stocks start the new year on a positive note, since that would be the perfect way for Mr Market to set the hook to trap bulls and bears alike. It would probably take most of the opening session on Tuesday for an enticing rally to build up steam, since the bears who […]
December 25, 2022 | Santa Rally Crawls Toward the New Year
In an economy that over decades has grown increasingly dependent on revved-up holiday sales, investors have responded by praying more fervently each year for a Santa rally. It’s an odd metaphor, however, considering that Wall Street even at its seasonal cheeriest has a heart as cold and dark as volcanic glass. The Santa of investors’ […]
December 18, 2022 | ‘AAPL Indicator’ Predicting a 10% Plunge
The modest bear market rally begun in October likely ended last week when stocks turned sharply lower after failing to achieve clear ‘Hidden Pivot’ rally targets. Now, if the selling should continue to exceed minor abcd targets as occurred last week, that would affirm that Papa Bear is back. AAPL in particular, the world’s most […]
December 11, 2022 | $AAPL – Apple Computer (Last:142.18)
AAPL looked like hell last week, stopping out the point ‘C’ low of a weak bullish pattern, but making little headway on the obligatory bounce. Desperation will not provide the distribution opportunities its handlers seek, but their one good trick — gapping the stock down on the opening in order to exhaust sellers — hasn’t […]
December 4, 2022 | Maybe 2023 Won’t Be So Bad
Last week’s commentary went full contrarian with the seemingly nutty idea that 2023 could be a dull year for investors despite the looming possibility of a global economic collapse. Inflation, deep recession, war, disease and political unrest are just a few of the factors that could bring a badly limping financial system down. But suppose […]
November 27, 2022 | The Case for a Merely Choppy 2023
Early in October, it lifted my spirits to be able to bloviate about how a too-widely-anticipated October crash seemed as likely as a Martian invasion. One lunar calendar-based prediction in particular had October 21 as the crash date, although the forecast went squishy at sundown that day when dark clouds failed to materialize over Wall […]
November 20, 2022 | What Twitter and Bitcoin Have in Common
Twitter and bitcoin share a key similarity in that their success while it lasted was just hubris. Realize that both were birthed by a virtual medium capable of monetizing turds if there is any discoverable demand for them whatsoever. Cardi B’s megahit single Wet Ass Pussy was proof of this. Twitter proffered turds in the form of […]
October 23, 2022 | Bear Market Kabuki
The seemingly strong rally that ended the week merely balanced out three days of bland weakness that had preceded it. In the S&P 500, the upthr ust steepened by the hour but ultimately failed to surpass any important prior peaks. The bear seems out to challenge bulls and bears alike with its obviousness. For one, […]
October 16, 2022 | October ‘Surprise’ Too Widely Advertised?
The spread between permabulls and permabears is at an extreme these days, even for October. This is the month when pessimists’ hopes are highest that an epic bear market will correct dangerous excesses that have been building up in the financial system for more than 50 years. A presumptive and welcome side effect of such […]