Not so long ago, November 18 to be precise, I wrote that the rally was still firmly in charge. Right now I’d take out that word “firmly.” I had thought that when the Standard & Poor’s 500 closed above 1110 on November 17 stocks were done consolidating and had definitely broken out of their trading range between [...]

Listening to the management team at Coach (COH) talk about the company’s business is an odd experience. This “fashion” company spends a lot of time talking about “engineering” its products and building production and distribution “infrastructure.” (Want to hear a sample of Coach-speak? Tune into the company’s presentation at the Morgan Stanley Global Consumer and [...]

Another of the “emergency” measures enacted to stop of the financial crisis from plunging the economy into a depression looks like it’s on the road to becoming “permanent.” And this one could really blow up on us taxpayers—again—not so far down the road. I’m talking about the “emergency” change in the rules for Federal Housing Administration (FHA) [...]

Feeling twitchy? Your portfolio is probably full of stocks trading at 52-week highs. And I’ll bet you’ve thought about selling. And you would do that–except that the stock market keeps going up (well except for the last couple of days), cash pays close to nothing, and it’s hard to find a stock to buy that’s not already [...]

You’re probably tired of reading this. I’m certainly tired of writing this. It’s all about the U.S. dollar. The moves of the dollar trump everything else when it comes to deciding whether stocks will go up or down on any particular day. So ignore the headlines explaining today’s move as a reaction to good or bad news. [...]

Peak gold? You may have heard of peak oil, the theory that at some point—ranging from 2005 to 2025–the world will have found all the easy oil there is to find and that after that new finds won’t be able to keep up with the global rate of consumption. But peak gold? Never even crossed the mind [...]

Cash flows and cheap money are enough to keep the current rally going into 2010, I believe. Comparisons with really, really weak quarters in the first half of 2009 for global economies in general and for company earning in particular favor a continuation of the upward trend in stock prices in the quarters that end in [...]

Stocks are hanging tough in the face of some heavy duty bad news. For the last two days, November 17 and 18 the Standard & Poor’s 500 has refused to drop below 1100. That’s often a sign that stocks are ready to move higher when the bad news flow stops. How bad has the news been? Heavy [...]

Talk is just talk. Even, or maybe that’s “especially,” when it’s from a company’s CEO. But it can still give investors a sense of where a company thinks it’s headed. Take, for example, the talk from Qualcomm (QCOM) CEO Paul Jacobs in Hong Kong on November 18. Jacobs told reporters that Qualcomm hopes to sell a fourth-generation chip [...]

(Originally posted on October 14 but several readers have asked me to repost.) What me worry? On a day when the Dow Jones Industrial Average closes above 10,000 for the first time in a year and when the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index closes within kissing distance of 1100 at 1092 ? Of course. When the market is [...]

Have you ever played Three Card Monte? It’s a classic street con here in New York. All you have to do to win is guess which of three cards is the Queen. The dealer and his accomplices set up the mark with a fast shuffle, often on a cardboard box so that nothing expensive is left [...]

Procrastination and mindless delay can create profits for investors. The example I use in my book The Jubak Picks is the environment.  It’s not that we don’t recognize environmental problems; it’s just that it takes so long for us to do anything about them. And then, of course, we rush to find the fastest fix. That delay [...]

Friends, readers, and countrymen, lend me your eyeballs. I come not to bury the fixed dollar-renminbi peg but to praise it. (Yeah, it doesn’t roll off the tongue but have you ever seen Shakespeare’s first draft of Anthony’s speech?) If you’re running the global economy (don’t we wish), there’s a whole lot wrong with China refusing [...]

The test is over. And the stock market rally has passed. On November 16, the Standard & Poor’s 500 and the NASDAQ 100 both joined the Dow Jones Industrials in setting new recovery highs. In other words all three indexes have busted out of the trading range of 1025 to 1098 on the S&P 500 that had [...]

Yara International (YARIY.PK) reported stinko revenue and earnings numbers for the third quarter of 2009 on October 21. Net income per share, for example, fell by a little more than 88% from the third quarter of 2008. So this was exactly the kind of kitchen sink quarter I was looking for when I last updated this [...]

We all know that for the long-term health of the global economy and financial system national stimulus packages have to end and governments need to begin paying down the debt that they’ve run up during this crisis. And we all doubt that governments will do any such thing. We suspect that stimulus and subsidies once extended [...]

Stocks will be volatile next week. On November 16 through 18 U.S. President Barack Obama will meet with Chinese president Hu Jintao and other Chinese leaders. The currency markets will study every word and rumor out of those meetings in Beijing for clues on when China will let its currency appreciate, on what China might be thinking [...]

Same day, November 12. Two different reports. Two different views on oil. First, the U.S. Energy Information Administration: There’s a glut of oil. Domestic crude inventories rose 1.8 million barrels to 338 million barrels in the week ending on November 6. That was way above the 600,000 barrel increase oil traders had expected according to a Reuters [...]

I know Apple (AAPL) is an investor darling trading near an all-time high. And I know the company’s products have tremendous consumer cache. So much so that the company is able to sell its iPhones and iMacs for prices well above those charged by competitors. But it still looks to me that Apple has missed its chance. It had [...]

That was fast. Less than two weeks ago investors were worried that stocks would break through support levels and head for new lows. Didn’t happen. On October 30 the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index hit 1036. That turned out to be the low in a dip that took the index down 6% from its high. And above [...]