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Barring some kind of existential crash that knocks 50% off equities in a matter of days or weeks, the Federal Reserve’s not coming to rescue the bear market from itself. So, we’ve got lower to go. The reason why centers around a phenomenon called the “wealth effect,” and the Fed knowing that what worked on […]

The August CPI numbers didn’t provide any real comfort as far as inflation is concerned, with headline inflation remaining above 8%, where it’s been for months now. Though fuel prices have fallen somewhat, shelter, food, and medical care indexes were through the roof last month. We’re paying over 13% more right now for groceries compared […]

There’s no doubt about it – we’re on the cusp of what may be a huge market crash, thanks to the Fed’s continued raising of interest rates. But if you’ve been following me a while, you know I’m fond of saying that every market, bad or good, has opportunities to make money if you know […]

Over the past two months, I’ve covered several of my favorite inflation-beating investment ideas, everything from floating rate investments to master limited partnerships (MLPs) and real estate investment trusts (REITs). Today I want to bring our focus back to business development companies, also known as BDCs for short. A business development company is an organization […]

The often referenced and too often misunderstood measure of the stock market’s volatility, the CBOE Volatility Index (ticker symbol “VIX”), is important because it tells you something about traders’ and investors’ psychology – mostly how afraid they are. That’s why the VIX is also known as the fear index. The VIX is calculated from prices […]

Last week, stocks broke a three-week losing streak, with the S&P 500 closing the week at 4067.36. Frankly, I’m happy for last week’s rally, but it came after significant volatility that rocked everyone’s portfolios through the summer. Case in point, June saw the market (as represented by the S&P 500) drop as much as 12.94% […]

Some of the crazy volatility we see in the stock market happens because stocks and the stock market are now derivatives of a derivatives market; and no, I didn’t get that backwards. Most people have no idea this has happened, happens, will happen again and again, or how it happens, what it does to market […]

Up until last week’s Jackson Hole Economic Symposium, it was pretty clear that the majority of investors had convinced themselves that the FED was going to start scaling back the increases in its interest rate policy. And then, in less than 10 minutes, Jerome Powell, the Chair of the Federal Reserve, set the record straight. […]

While Wall Street, investors, the media, and the public are hyper-focused on the Federal Reserve’s rate hiking policy path, the same trap door markets fell through in 2018 is about to open wide, and nobody’s talking about it. The trap door is the Fed’s quantitative tightening (QT) plan, the opposite of its bull market friendly […]

There’s only one word that investors need to be focusing on right now: inflation. As long as inflation is higher than the Federal Reserve is comfortable with, the Fed will be inclined to raise interest rates to tame inflation. Higher rates effect consumer credit card spending, the US housing market, and more importantly for us, […]