Today is the last trading day of the year, and folks, this has been one of those years where you just have to sit back, take a deep breath and be glad that it’s over. If I had told you that we’d go through what we’ve gone through—the tsunami/nuclear disaster in Japan, the Arab Spring, [...]

Once again, gold is the big story. We’re seeing a fairly dramatic end-of-year liquidation, and it’s retraced so much that we’re almost entering bear market territory. I’m calling this the beginning of a bear trap: the trend followers are no longer getting long and are starting to get short—which in my mind is a buying [...]

Many of the lessons that I learned in trading the markets were learned from my old mentor, Bing Sun, who went from being a boy genius to an academic at Harvard to running the multi-billion-dollar Harvard Endowment Fund. After he left the fund, I became his assistant on the floor at the CME. Spending hours [...]

All week on the show we’ve been talking about strategic cornerstones for 2012. We’ve looked at gold and real estate pretty extensively, and I hope to get to grains and softs next week. Today, we talked quite a bit about oil. As I see it, one of the big surprises in the evolution of the [...]

Housing remains in focus today, with starts rebounding to 9.3% and permits up 6%. Both of those numbers are much better than expected, and the market seems to like them early in today’s session. But they’re also not telling us the whole story. As nice as those numbers may sound, the fact is that a [...]

Some more positive numbers in housing came out today. The National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index was at 21, the first time that builders’ confidence improved three straight months since 2009. Of course, with real-estate in this country so interconnected with employment, I’m not taking this as a sign that we’re seeing [...]

As I write this, the March gold contract is trading around 1607, down more than 3% on the day. This downward pressure is coming from central bankers who need to raise money by the end of the year but can’t sell off their debt (bonds)—and all they have left that’s liquid is gold. I’m bullish [...]

Early in today’s session, Best Buy’s stock price is getting kicked around on reports that their third quarter earnings fell by 13%. My co-host Sara Ritz, aka the Market Belle, mentioned on the show this morning how she wasn’t surprises at all about Best Buy’s miss. After all, their stores have essentially turned into a [...]

Folks, with quadruple expiration taking place on Friday and the holidays just around the corner, this week is essentially the last week of the year to trade. On the one hand, we have portfolio managers who are underinvested. And on the other hand, we have books about to close for the year—there’s something of a [...]