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The Baby Boom started in 1946, and continued through 1964.  Boomers saw their first instance of a financial bubble in the 1970s when gold was finally released from its permanent fix to the dollar, and was allowed to float.  It went from $42 to $900 in a decade, then collapsed throughout the 1980s. 

After the gold bubble of the 1970s, Boomers and others swore they would never get caught up in another bubble in something as frivolous as gold.  No, no, from now on they would only invest in things that actually had earnings, like technology stocks.

After the Internet bubble hit its peak in 2000, Boomers swore they would never invest in something ephemeral like Internet stocks.  From now on, they would stick to something safe, something real, like real estate.

And now, after the 2007 peak of the real estate bubble led to a collapse of the stock market and a deep economic slowdown, Boomers are again making resolutions to never again get caught up in something so... Read More

We do a lot of work with Advance-Decline (A-D) statistics, and some people may not be aware that the same sort of analysis can be done on Up Volume and Down Volume (UV-DV) data.  In the same way that we add up all of the past values of advances and declines to construct a cumulative A-D Line, we can also construct a cumulative UV-DV Line, also called a Daily Volume Line.

One big difference between the two is that every listed issue gets exactly one vote per day in the A-D statistics.  But the voting is unlimited when looking at the volume statistics, so heavier volume days can move the Daily Volume Line more.  Stocks that trade more shares also get to vote more, which may or may not be problematic.

When comparing the A-D Line and the Volume Line for the NYSE data, we find that the market is most capable of making powerful trending moves upward or downward when the two are working in agreement with each other.  Back in 1999, it was a problem to see the major... Read More

The federal government has thrown a whole lot of money at the economy in an effort to try and improve the unemployment situation.  So far, those efforts have not gotten very much traction, leading to all sorts of discussions about the merits of government stimulus.

One look at this week's chart will help everyone who see it to understand why the unemployment rate has not yet shown much improvement.  It is a simple matter of having to wait for the right time to arrive.

In the chart, I am comparing the inflation rate to the unemployment rate.  Back in the 1970s, it was fashionable for economists and politicians to add these two numbers together to get what they called the "misery index".  But the real relationship is revealed in this chart, which is that inflation LEADS unemployment by about 2 years.

The plot of the CPI inflation rate is shifted forward in the chart by 2 years to reveal that its movements tend to get echoed 2 years later in the... Read More

It has been over-reported in the press that the current economic slowdown is the "worst since the Great Depression".  In the first place, that's not true; conditions were worse in the early 1980s, when unemployment reached 10.7%.  Conditions were also worse just after World War II, when weapons and munitions factories were shut down, and when inflation jumped 20%.  It is just that the Department of Labor did not start keeping statistics on unemployment until 1948, so reliable statistics about unemployment after WWII are not available.

And in the second place, it does a disservice to history if the reporters of today can only recall the Great Depression, and not the multitude of other periods of economic difficulty. 

But the stock market has an interesting point to make about the comparison to the Great Depression.  This week's chart looks at the SP500 then versus now, and the point of alignment is the top in 1929 with the top of the Internet bubble in 2000. ... Read More