Planning for the End of Life
Jeff Opdyke, author of the Wall Street Journal’s Love & Money column, has an important article on planning for the end of life in today’s Sunday Journal. One of the things that is hard to come to terms with is…
The Interpretation of the Best Buy Quarter and the Last 9 Weeks in the Stock Market
On Tuesday I wrote: The Street interpreted Best Buy’s results as saying that the American consumer is not dead and will continue to spend on discretionary items. That interpretation seems to have played out this week. The S&P Retail Index…
Best Buy’s Good Quarter Boosts Wall Street’s Confidence in the Consumer
Before the open today Best Buy (NYSE: BBY), the nation’s largest electronics retailer, announced a pretty good fiscal (ended Aug 26, 2006) second quarter. Same store sales in the United States were up 3.0% in the three months ended Aug…
Profit from the High Price of Gas – The Best Independent Refiner is on Sale
You might have noticed that gas has become alot more expensive the last couple of years. One reason for that is that oil, the raw material from which gas is produced, has gotten more expensive due to growing demand around…
Base Metals Set for Near Term Correction
Driven by torrid growth in China base metals have experienced a phenomenal bull market the last few years. Copper has gone from around 75 cents/lb. three years ago to more than $3.50/lb. today. Nickel has gone from around $2/lb. towards…
Kids and Money
Bill Bonner, the Founder of Agora Financial, a contrarian investment newsletter company of which I am a big fan and subscriber, and author of, most recently, Empire of Debt, has some interesting, and entertaining, thoughts on the issue of kids…
The Bull Market That Began on Sept. 11, 2001
When Al Qaeda struck the World Trade Center on Sept 11, 2001 it ended an era of relative global peace that had begun with the fall of the Soviet Union and the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989. …
Fed Minutes Reveal Balancing Act at the Fed
A few weeks after each Fed meeting, the minutes for that meeting are released. The minutes are not an actual transcript of what was said but a shamelessly doctored summary. As I tried to explain a couple weeks ago the…
Local Home Market In The Tank
A couple weeks ago DataQuick, the excellent real estate information firm providing data primarily for the California market, came out with its July 2006 numbers. The Sacramento Bee ran a sobering article based on the report: July … saw the biggest drop…
Morgan Stanley’s Stephen Roach on the Popping of the Housing Bubble and Its Effect on the US and Global Economies
Stephen Roach, Chief Economist at Morgan Stanley, had some noteworthy things to say about the bursting of the housing bubble and its effects on the US and global economies in his most recent two commentaries at Morgan Stanley’s Global Economic…