Pull the trigger with confidence.

Old-school monetarists have longed for a return to having gold as the real reserve currency.  So here is a fun quandary: suppose you’re a hard-core auriphile, longing for a return to gold being the world’s reserve currency.  Suppose you could get what you have longed for, but with a price: China gets to call the shots.  Do you accept the deal? 

This week’s chart shows that the movements of gold prices are pretty tightly tied to the movements of the Chinese yuan.  So if gold prices are ever... Read More

One of my favorite predictive models had me looking for a decent selloff in the summer of 2018, but the U.S. stock market decided not to participate.  So what happened?

The model in this week’s chart contains data from the weekly Commitment of Traders (COT) Report, published by the CFTC.  This data is on the eurodollar futures contract, the most liquid and widely traded of all futures contracts.  I should emphasize that in this context, the term “eurodollar” is not a currency futures... Read More

Every chart of price data is a depiction of a ratio.  If you look at a chart of your favorite stock, what you are really looking at is the ratio of the value of your stock to the value of the dollar, since stock prices are quoted in dollars.  AAPL recently was at 226 dollars per share.  Gold recently is at 1200 dollars per ounce.  Every price is a ratio. 

But you don’t have to have currency in a ratio.  The value of the DJIA is an approximation of dollars per something; I won’t discuss the... Read More

In the election of 1992 there was an insurgent candidate, who did not win a majority of the popular vote, but who took the White House and set about reorganizing the government in a manner more to his liking.  The first two years of his term in office were marked by numerous scandals, and by a stock market which saw a scary dip in the 2nd year which eventually resolved itself into a strong uptrend during the 3rd year of his presidential term.  At that time, the Federal Reserve was commencing... Read More

The news of a 4.1% rate of GDP growth in Q2 of 2018 got the financial media excited.  4.1% was the rate of change compared to the prior quarter.  When we use a 1-year lookback, it is not quite that strong of a number, but still good news in terms of what it does to getting more people working and paying taxes. 

The troubling news this week is that the latest data from the American Institute of Architects, http://www.aia.org, shows that their Architecture Billing Inquiries Index is headed... Read More

We normally think of seasonality as being an annual phenomenon.  But it can appear in other ways, such as the 4-year Presidential Cycle Pattern, and quarterly, as with this week’s chart of the share price of Apple Corp (Nasdaq:AAPL).

The price of AAPL stock got everyone excited on August 1st after the company announced strong earnings.  Prices shot up to a new high, and the company’s market capitalization shot up above $1 trillion.  It is the first U.S. company to reach that threshold, and... Read More

We all know about the factor of seasonality, and especially about how it is distilled into the bit of TV news wisdom, “Sell In May and go away”.  That phrase has been around for decades, originally supposedly referring to traders in England who would “Sell in May and go away, and come back on St. Leger’s Day”.  This referred to the custom of aristocrats, merchants, and bankers who would skip town and go to the country during the hot months, returning for the St. Leger’s Stakes, a horse race... Read More