Today, Europe is a headline I want to cover.  All you have to do is look at the charts these past few months.  Even prior to expiration, you saw a different market in the morning and a different market in the afternoon.  I was speaking to people in Iowa about this.  These people spoke in [...]

Folks, this morning’s ADP number blew away street. Private-sector payrolls increased by 325,000 last month, far surpassing the forecast of 178,000. Now the expectations for tomorrow’s non-farm payrolls are even higher, but the range is still pretty significant—the projections are anywhere from 110,000-200,000. Tomorrow’s number will be the real tell, of course, but it’s nice [...]

Welcome to 2012, folks! Before the holiday I broke down what I believe will be the three keys for investors to watch going into the new year. As you know, I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy, so on this first trading day of the year I wanted to go through three sectors that I think [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

Folks, when you really boil it down, the question that’s been at the center of this whole European situation has always been pretty simple: How can you be a monetary union without being a fiscal union? And the answer is equally simple: you can’t be. If you share a currency, you have to share other [...]

I ran across a great article on Bloomberg this morning about the relationship between U.S. equities and the Euro. Turns out that the correlation is pretty strong, and has increased substantially this year. According to their numbers, the Dow and the Euro moved in the same direction 72% of the time in 2011, compared with [...]

Imagine you’re riding in the back seat of a car. Your friend is driving, and it’s storming outside. You assume that he’s going the right speed, checking his blind spot, following the car in front of him at a safe distance. You know there’s a possibility that at any second he could be swerving all [...]

Folks, as you may have noticed, The Jack B. Show took a hiatus last month. We’ve retooled some things, made some great additions to the program and I’m proud to say we’re back with a new and improved daily podcast, which you can get on iTunes and right here at TheJackBShow.com. I’d like to take [...]

Folks, the bond vigilantes have moved their focus from Greece to Italy. Italian bonds slumped, driving 2-, 5-, 10- and 30-year yields to euro-era records after LCH Clearnet SA raised the deposit it demands for trading the nation’s securities. This has caused a global margin call that’s resulted in liquidation of everything—stocks, commodities, etc. The [...]