Stock-markets are falling. Does this mean that the nine-year bull market has come to an end, that shares are finally adjusting to some uncomfortable realities, as their extreme valuations have long suggested they would? [Read more…]
Shares: Should You Panic?
Planning Your Portfolio
Planning Your Portfolio – All successful investors use heuristics to shape their strategic decisions, but it’s wrong to assume they are always correct. [Read more…]
Gold Starts to Recover Its Traditional Role
Gold is making a comeback as money, despite a century of near-universal negativism about its future as a key element in global finance. [Read more…]
Why Lower Equity Returns Look Likely
Equity Returns – Optimistic arguments about longer-term profits to be made in US shares are “deeply flawed” as they’re based on double-counting and circular reasoning, Brett Arends argues on Marketwatch. [Read more…]
Banking: Crisis by Design
Banking – After the devastating Sub-Prime Crisis, which has cost the world trillions of dollars’ worth of lost economic growth, destroyed millions of jobs and businesses, and burdened taxpayers with huge state debts that continue to mount, you would expect implementation of radical reforms to prevent such a crisis from happening again. [Read more…]
Shale Gas: a High-Cost Resource
Shale Gas – Despite much talk about how it’s going to revolutionize global supplies, investors in the shares have seen them perform poorly for years, major companies in the sector such as Shell and BHP Billiton have been taking some big write-downs and the much-predicted improvement in natural gas prices fails to arrive. [Read more…]
Share and Bond Markets
Earnings – the lack of them – remain the biggest threat to American equities, whose recent strong growth has been driven by optimism and buy-backs rather than underlying profits, while the latter have come from cost-cutting, not growth in sales. [Read more…]
Strong Euro, Weak Dollar
One of the more difficult decisions facing investors is what is going to happen to the euro. [Read more…]
Promising Themes to Invest In
Equity investors should ignore the “incessant din” of current news and focus on long-term secular trends, advises Morgan Stanley Wealth Management strategist Dan Skelly. [Read more…]
Goldilocks continues to rule
Goldilocks continues to rule in investment markets
A Goldilocks environment is one where there are no extremes – economic growth is positive but moderate, inflation is low, exchange rates fluctuate within a comfortable range, central banks pursue market-friendly money-creation and interest-rate policies. Conditions are neither too “hot” nor too “cold.” [Read more…]