The most surprising thing about Wall St. is the fact that we need both of these types – the forever optimists and forever pessimists. Each of them are just as important as the other.
I was about to undergo a new project where tons of measurements had to be taken and suddenly I realized that there wasn’t a pencil in the house. After scouring around, I found two pencil remnants, very short and only one had any eraser left. So I did something I haven’t done since my kids were in elementary school, I went shopping for pencils.
If we are at the end of this run-up in commodities, and hence inflationary pressures, some factors we haven’t seen before could be responsible, making the end of this economic expansion look much different than those of the past.
Let’s discuss the mysterious Number 9. This number fascinates me since I found out on my own that when adding a numerical sequence with the purpose of reducing it to a single digit the number 9 does some very interesting stuff indeed!
Have you ever heard the term “the lost decade”? It was used to describe a period of time after the internet bubble burst in the year 2000 which preceded a decade long bear market in U.S. stocks. The S&P 500 Index returned a paltry 2.3%/year, a consistently negative net return after inflation, and for an entire decade!
Your spending power is not walking, no – it’s run away! Anyone with glasses could have seen this coming, so why didn’t Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell see that inflation was going to stick around? Especially since he only stopped over-stimulating the U.S. economy what two months ago?
Now that I’ve been officially retired for a year I wanted to look back on some realities about work and working. It might surprise you to know that it’s really not the big breaks that define your success, it’s more the small things that you do each day/each week.
This stock market isn’t going anywhere past the occasional “bear market rally”. The reason is that there is absolutely no catalyst to act as a sort of paradigm shift.
Everyone has heard the colloquialism, “it’s time in the market, not timing the market” that is the wisest approach to investing. But is this really valid in all circumstances? You may surprised…
People in prominent business and government positions can make really bad decisions, decisions that are harmful to the country, the economy, and even to their own families. But yet, they seem to walk around like they’re the last to be told they have no clothes on? It takes a good while before finally someone will call a person like this out for what they’re doing.
And until that [disappearing] brain matter re-appears I see no compelling reason for a new bull market to begin… cash is getting ready to be real scarce! 🙂
18,000 virtual-only Crypto-currencies, a market cap now well in excess of $1 trillion U.S. dollars and climbing. Seriously? I’m not sure of how this story will end, all I can say is I’ve never before witnessed a bubble of this magnitude!