Two things I find very interesting are housing and interest rates, which are intertwined.  This is definitely one of the things we need to keep an eye on.  Folks, this is why I am  bearish interest rates and bearish bonds.  I think we are going to see  interest rates increase and the price of bonds [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Folks, I mentioned yesterday how the PPI came out a little hotter than expected, and that I wanted to see today’s CPI come out in line with it. That turned out to be the case. When you subtract the core, producer prices increased .2% in September, while consumer prices rose .3%. That tells me that [...]

Folks, there are three distinct factors that are driving these markets right now: earnings, Europe and China. Let’s break it down, shall we? Earnings. I’ve talked a lot about the lowering of expectations for corporate earnings and how they might have gotten too low over the course of the last couple of months. I also [...]

Folks, the latest housing numbers were released this morning. Permits were up—considering that August was a pretty dismal month as far as the markets were concerned, I’d say that’s pretty good. Unfortunately, starts fell in August to a three-month low, and that really bothers me. What’s going on in housing? Anecdotally, banks do not have [...]

Folks, earlier this morning we got two lukewarm economic reports. On the jobs front: for the first time since April, the weekly unemployment claims fell below 400,000.  It wasn’t by much—the seasonally adjusted number of new claims came in at 398,000—but even that small downtick caused the markets to jump. As far as housing, the [...]

Folks, when you have a country with a debt-to-GDP ratio that rises above 150%, historically that country defaults. There’s only one exception, which was Great Britain following WWII—and the only reason they didn’t default was because their close ally, the United States, made sure they didn’t. They did, however, lose their status as a reserve [...]