Margin Debt Hits 5-Year High
A belated entry: "Even last year’s lackluster stock-market gains encouraged investors to borrow money to trade stocks,...
P/E Expansion and Contraction
Last week, I showed a 50 year chart of the S&P500, focusing on the P/E over that time period. Today’s chart covers the same...
Window Dressing
Jason Goepfert of sentimentrader.com noted the following statistics regarding Window Dressing, i.e., mark ups for the quarter-end (as...
What are the odds of 2006 being a positive year?
I just had an interesting conversation with Mike Panzner, Director of Institutional Sales Trading at Rabo Securities. Mike is a quant who...
Be Careful with the Contrary Indicators
We’ve been hearing an awful lot of chatter about Bullish and Bearish sentiment lately. It’s a subject near and dear to our hearts,...
Chart of the Week: How Bullish Are Wall Street Strategists?
Business Week’s 2006-year end predictions are out, and they cover 75 or so Wall Street Strategists and Analysts. Over all, they seem to...
Before You Tap Into That Retirement Account . . .
The WSJ posits 10 questions to ask yourself before you retire: A steady paycheck is one of life’s comforts. Once or twice a month,...
YTD versus other time periods
Aaron Task is Executive Editor at The Street.com; He’s a fairly skeptical guy, not given to the usual cheerleading. In a discussion...
The New Blind Pools
A fairly scathing article by Eric Savitz in Barron’s this morning on SPACs: The New Blind Pools: "It’s the return of the...
ETFs vs. Funds
I use ETFs alot, and find they can be vastly superior to Mutual Funds in many ways. The WSJ did a nice comparo between ETFs and...