Tag Archives: The Stock Market

The Stress of Losing Billions Up until the WallStreetBets crowd short squeezed Melvin Capital for a $7 billion loss, Robinhood had it made. But losing billions is stressful. And when your product blows up your customer the clucking that follows comes hot and heavy. A surprise revival of business at Game-Stop… [PT] One of the sweetest displays in the world, we’ve been told, is the bursts of digital confetti that shower down Robinhood’s investment app to celebrate the...

Gold Sector Outperforms Broad Market The gold sector is in an uptrend since September 2018. The initially rather labored move accelerated after a secondary low was established in May 2019 and the 50-day and 200-day moving averages were breached for the second time. Last week the two moving averages were once again overcome in the course of the post-crash rebound. Here is a chart showing the entire move since 2018: HUI mid-2018-2020After a rather harrowing decline...

Post Hoc Fallacy On Tuesday, at the precise moment Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell commenced delivering his semiannual monetary policy report to the House Financial Services Committee, something unpleasant happened. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) didn’t go up. Rather, it went down. Were the DJIA operating within the framework of a free capital market it would be normal for the index to go both up and down. But remember, the U.S. stock market is hardly a...

  An Example of Strong Single Stock Seasonality Many individual stocks exhibits phases of seasonal strength. Being invested in these phases is therefore an especially promising strategy. Today I want to introduce you to a stock that tends to advance particularly strongly at this time of the year: Novo Nordisk. The Danish pharmaceutical group supplies a broad range of products and is a global market leader in diabetes drugs. Danish drug company Novo Nordisk Novo...

Beta-driven Fantasy The decade long bull market run, aside from making everyone ridiculously rich, has opened up a new array of competencies. The proliferation of ETFs, for instance, has precipitated a heyday for the ETF Analyst. So, too, blind faith in data has prompted the rise of Psychic Quants… who see the future by modeling the past. Gandalf, quant of Middle-Earth, dispensing sage advice. [PT] For the big financial outfits, optimizing systematic – preprogrammed...

The Strongest Seasonal Stock Market Trend Readers may already have guessed: when the vibrant colors of the autumn leaves are revealed in all their splendor, the strongest seasonal period of the year begins in the stock market – namely the year-end rally. Stocks typically rise in this time period. However, there are questions, such as: how often does a rally take place, how strong is it, and when is the best time for investors to enter the market? I will answer...

A Pleasant Surprise You can probably imagine that I am convinced of the merits of seasonality. However, even I was surprised that an investment strategy based on seasonality is apparently leaving numerous far more popular strategies in the dust. And yet, this is exactly what a recent comprehensive scientific study asserts – a study that probably considers a longer time span than most: it examines up to 217 years of...

  Europe at an Important Juncture European economic fundamentals have deteriorated rather noticeably over the past year – essentially ever since the German DAX Index topped out in January 2018. Now, European stock markets have reached an important juncture from a technical perspective. Consider the charts of the Euro-Stoxx 50 Index and the DAX shown below:   Euro Stoxx 50 and DAX, DailyThe Euro-Stoxx 50 Index already...

Has a Bear Market in Stocks Begun? The stock market correction into late December was of approximately the same size as the mid 2015/early 2016 twin downturns, so this is not an idle question. Moreover, many bears seem quite confident lately from an anecdotal perspective, which may invite a continuation of the recent upward correction. That said, there is not much confirmation of said confidence in data that can be...

Investment Grade Junk All is now bustle and hubbub in the late months of the year.  This goes for the stock market too. If you recall, on September 22nd the S&P 500 hit an all-time high of 2,940.  This was nearly 100 points above the prior high of 2,847, which was notched on January 26th.  For a brief moment, it appeared the stock market had resumed its near decade long upward trend. Chartists witnessed the take...