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  • Finance 0

    Silver Breaks Free From This 5-year Slide

    This chart looks at Silver ETF (SLV) over the past 7-years. Since 2011, SLV has remained inside of a well defined falling channel. For the first time in years, SLV is breaking above this 5-year falling channel at (1). Its been a long slide for SLV, nice large weekly move, as it took out dual resistance.  ...
    On July 8, 2016 / By
  • Finance 0

    NY Fed Nowcast Remains 2.1%, GDPNow Dips To 2.4%, Markit 1.0%

    The Atlanta Fed and New York Fed GDP model forecasts are slowly converging with the New York Fed Nowcast at 2.1% and the Atlanta Fed GDPNow at 2.4%. GDPNow Latest forecast: 2.4 percent — July 6, 2016   The GDPNow model forecast for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the second quarter of 2016 is 2.4 percent on July 6, down from 2.6 percent on July 1. The forecast for second-quarter real consumer spending growth ticked down from 4.4 percent to 4.3 percent after yesterday’s light vehicle sales release from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. The forecast of the contribution of net exports to second-quarter real GDP ...
    On July 8, 2016 / By
  • Finance 0

    3 Real Estate ETFs To Play Brexit Fears

    While equity markets continue to witness massive outflows following Britain’s decision to leave the European Union (EU), the real estate sector stands in good stead. ETFs from this sector attracted the highest volume of inflows among all equity sectors in June and over the first half of this year, according to State Street Global Advisors. A safe-haven appeal, impressive yields and the prevailing low-rate environment boosted demand for real estate ETFs. Banking on these impressive fundamentals, favorably ranked real estate ETFs may prove to be profitable additions to the portfolio of any investor seeking impressive return even in this uncer...
    On July 8, 2016 / By
  • Finance 0

    S&P Back To All Time Highs After 17 Consecutive Weeks Of Mutual Fund Outflows

    When it comes to soaring precious metal, and especially gold, prices there is little surprise what the source is: investors are dumping near record amount into Precious Metal mutual and ETF funds. Fund Flow tracker Lipper confirmed as much last night when in its latest weekly summary it calculated that investors poured the most money into U.S.-based funds invested in precious metals since February, adding $2 billion to these funds in the latest week.  Fund investors bid up gold and other precious metals prices during the seven-day period ended July 6 in the aftermath of the June 23 Brexit vote.  SPDR Gold Shares was especially popular, ta...
    On July 8, 2016 / By
  • Finance 0

    What Is Gold?

    Jason Zweig has a couple of good pieces in the WSJ today on gold (see here and here). Jason is not a big fan of owning gold in a portfolio and I generally agree with him. However, I don’t completely agree with the description of gold as a “pet rock” and I think it detracts from the point he’s trying to make. So let me see if I can make a similar point from a more empirical perspective. I like to work from what I think is a form of rigorous empiricism. I tend to think like an engineer so I always ask how things are constructed before asking how they can be used. For instance, a stock is a financial instrument giving the owner a clai...
    On July 8, 2016 / By
  • Finance 0

    Benjamin Graham Insights Into Managing Other People’s Money

    Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor is one of a handful of books you hear mentioned over and over again when you ask investors to name the best investing books of all-time. Graham was far ahead of his time in talking about investor behavior and human psychology in terms of the role they play in shaping how markets and investors generally work. Let me explain. By Ben Carlson (awealthofcommonsense.com) The edition I read was annotated by Jason Zweig which was very helpful because he was able to provide context around many of the subjects that were included in the original version…written back in the 1950s. I recently came a...
    On July 8, 2016 / By
  • Finance 0

    Payrolls Were Loud This Month, As Last

    As it currently stands in the headline BLS figures, the Establishment Survey greatly rebounded to + 287k from a downward revised +11k in May. There is this month, just as last month, too much emphasis on the monthly payroll figure as it is more often than not noise. We can only hope the drastic extremes of the past two months may have finally injected a more cautious approach to what has always been a statistical process. Two payroll reports ago, one that was taken as “ugly”, I wrote: There is very little value to begin with in trying to parse monthly variation, reflected in a wide confidence interval at just 90% confidence. For all we k...
    On July 8, 2016 / By
  • Finance 0

    NYSE Margin Debt Decreased In May

    The New York Stock Exchange publishes end-of-month data for margin debt on the NYX data website, where we can also find historical data back to 1959. Let’s examine the numbers and study the relationship between margin debt and the market, using the S&P 500 as the surrogate for the latter. The first chart shows the two series in real terms — adjusted for inflation to today’s dollar using the Consumer Price Index as the deflator. At the 1995 start date, we were well into the Boomer Bull Market that began in 1982 and approaching the start of the Tech Bubble that shaped investor sentiment during the second half of the decade. T...
    On July 8, 2016 / By
  • Finance 0

    Top Gold Miners Burned Record Amount Of Fuel To Produce Gold In 2015

    The top two gold miners burned a record amount of fuel to produce gold in 2015. Even though Barrick and Newmont burned less overall fuel than their operations did in 2013, their consumption per ounce of gold produced was the highest ever. This is not good news for the gold mining industry as the world has peaked in cheap oil production.  While total global liquid energy production continues to be at record levels, the high-value cheap light sweet crude oil peaked several years ago.  Furthermore, we are now witnessing the rapid decline of U.S. oil production as many of the shale oil fields go into terminal decline. As shown in these next two...
    On July 8, 2016 / By
  • Finance 0

    General Market Commentary – July 8, 2016

        We review the week in financial markets and look forward to next week`s big economic drivers. Watch for a lot of inflation data and central bank commentary by fed officials next week. We could also get some fireworks in currency markets next week. I will be watching the Japanese Yen like a hawk for a close below parity with the US Dollar. (Video length 00:05:46)...
    On July 8, 2016 / By