Historically the last show of the year I do my fearless forecast for the coming year. This year it’s bleak from a pure valuation perspective. But from a liquidity perspective, it’s up, up, and away. Our first table shows the Street has an average 23.69
The put/call ratio offers a good reading on shorter-term speculation. The standard is a one week average perspective to smooth out the day to day noise. We also look at a one month perspective, where we are seeing even stronger readings. It often takes weeks
Last week we discussed the extreme bullish readings in the AAII Sentiment survey. Statistically, the difference between the bulls and the bears was at the 95% confidence interval. Historically, this marks an extreme condition and on average, the probability of return over the next year
Over the past decade, outside of a handful of large technology companies, earnings per share (EPS) growth has, in part, been a function of financial engineering (by way of share buybacks). All this is made possible by low interest rates. As governments continue to pile
Gold equity analysts just do not believe that gold prices are going to stay high. The 18 analysts offering 12-month price forecasts for Barrick Gold Corp have a median target of 34.52, with a high estimate of 47.00 and a low estimate of 30.00. The
The amount of options bought for expiry this week is some of the big tech names like AAPL and TSLA are huge. When an option is bought, the market maker typically hedges by buying the underlying stock. When the option expires, that hedge gets sold
The quality investment factor is shinning in the past few years. These are companies that are good corporate stewards of their balance sheets, throw off lots of free cash low, have much more stable earnings than most, and do not use excessive leverage (as much
The great thing about ETFs and index tracking is that you own the entire index and that you benefit from survivorship bias. The good companies stay in the index, the improving companies get added to the index, and the weak ones drop off. The bad
With gold making all-time highs, I thought I would update some of my thinking for followers. Asset (commodity) prices move based on the fundamentals of supply and demand distorted by periods of the manic speculation of fear and greed. The rationale for the investment (buy,
There are hundreds of investment factors and characteristics that help drive returns. For me, I’m a (relative) value or growth (at a reasonable price) investor. I want to tilt my portfolio to the factors that I think will perform better looking forward over the coming