Published November 4, 2016
Last week’s market summary noted that stock investors were looking for earnings to light a fire under the bulls and deliver stocks to new high ground, a spot the Nasdaq Composite index had visited for one day early in that week. Since that new high for the Nasdaq, it’s been nothing but badness for stocks with the S&P 500 index logging a rare eight straight down days. (more…)
Published October 28, 2016
While earnings have been generally better than expected so far in this earnings season, stocks have continued to struggle finding enough buyers to push higher. Indeed, small and midcap stocks have broken downward as investors pull back on taking risk. Of the companies that have reported through October 26, 67% have beaten analyst consensus estimates. Since 1999, the historical earnings “beat rate” is 62%.
Published October 21, 2016
This week we pull the curtain back a bit on TimingCube‘s publisher, Fraser Partners, LLC, to discuss some of their non-TimingCube activities. When we build a Model, where do we start? What are we trying to achieve? (more…)
Published October 14, 2016
The Ticker Tool is a powerful way to see how relevant our signals are to a given security. The results you will see are the results of applying our Turbo signals to the security you input. Let’s look at an example. In this example we are curious whether the Turbo Model works well if we buy XLV when Turbo is on a Buy signal. We are thinking we will just short the broad market on a Sell signal, so we input the SPY (S&P 500 ETF). (more…)
Published October 7, 2016
October is crunch time for this stock market. Investors have been waiting all year for signs of a resumption of growth in corporate earnings. The slide below from JP Morgan displays the projections for a substantial uptick in that growth (see the brown-green bars of analyst projections marching upward). (more…)
Published September 30, 2016
One aspect of investing that never gets old – we never, ever know where the gains are going to come from. Last year it was the biotech stocks leading the way in the first half of the year. Then, they hit a wall and tumbled hard while the FANG stocks (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google/Alphabet) stepped up to carry the Nasdaq 100 near new highs. While the Nasdaq was holding up well small-cap stocks were struggling to a negative yearly return. Below the surface of the broad market indexes there are almost always some stocks showing well. (more…)
We found Blaine Rollins’ blog, always a great read, to have a particularly eclectic and interesting panoply of items this week. Here is the string of items we found of interest: (more…)
We have noted in many articles of the past that asset prices come from fundamentals (e.g. earnings/dividends) x investor emotion. Below is a reprint of an article from Ben Carlson’s “A Wealth of Common Sense” blog discussing the same notion but from a much higher power than ourselves – namely Vanguard founder John Bogle!
Take it away Mr. Carlson and Mr. Bogle:
Vanguard’s John Bogle has a simple formula for estimating future stock market returns: (more…)
One of the major themes of investing in 2016 has been the persistence of ultra-low interest rates. Much has been made of the fact that fully 1/3 of the sovereign (government) bond yields are now below zero. In an era where central banks buy bonds hand over fist insuring an almost unlimited demand, market participants have become complacent and expecting of rates to remain low and going lower. Thursday and Friday, central banks started to perhaps begin taking baby steps in the other direction. (more…)
If you are interested at all in business and/or technology you must pay close attention to the rapidly changing world of automobile transportation.
All three of these big leaps in service, technology, and transportation are happening simultaneously and at a speed of development that is breathtaking. (more…)