July 2014

Chart o’ the Day: “Earnings Will Disappoint”

Laszlo Birinyi is out with his new quarterly commentary and he’s got a wicked chart to demonstrate how wrong the bearish earnings forecasts have been in the media all year. US companies continue to find bottom-line growth and the naysayers continue to be confounded… Earnings will disappoint. As regular as rain in April, bears have…

The Labor Market vs the Bond Market

The tightening labor market and increasing confidence we’ve been seeing in the surveys are starting to have an actual impact on people’s salaries. Things are improving beyond just the top few tiers of US workers. According to Reuters: “U.S. labor costs recorded their largest increase in more than 5-1/2 years in the second quarter, a sign…

‘Interstellar’ full trailer hits!

Director Chris Nolan (Memento, the last Batman trilogy) premiered the full trailer for his upcoming Interstellar at Comic-Con this past week and the nerds went ballistic for it. In the last few hours its begun to surface online. The film comes out in November, looks pretty intense.

This is why I’m here

The other day, a Barron’s reporter called me “sermonizing”. He said some other nice things about me too, and I wasn’t mad, but it did make me think. Amidst my efforts to educate myself and my readers with the research and writing I do, am I too coming across too preachy? Is it a tone thing…

There’s ALWAYS a divergence

“There’s no science behind that, people look at that kind of thing and they point out what they want to see.” In the above image, you’ll see the photograph that became the cover shot for the Beatle’s final album, Abbey Road. The photo contains one of the most talked about divergences of all time – Paul…

The Idea of Prediction is an Aphrodisiac

Look at the below table of Assets Under Management for the hedge fund industry (via Barclays), a figure which now approaches $3 trillion. You will often hear people ask “How can this be the case?” If markets are efficient, the logic goes, shouldn’t market participants themselves be efficient? If markets are rational, should not the…

Memo to CAPE Slaves

You don’t hear much out of the adherents of CAPE these days, as even its most ardent fans have given up on it as a timing tool. Earlier this year and during much of last year, I’d taken the Cyclically Adjusted Price-Earnings ratio to task for various reasons, most notably the fact that it didn’t…

The Death of Twitter Had Been Greatly Exaggerated

By now, you’ve no doubt heard about Twitter’s coming-out party last night, in which the company finally reported the game-changing quarter that Wall Street’s been waiting for. In its third-ever report as a public company, Twitter blew away the analysts expectations on just about every front, reporting a profit of 2 cents per share versus an…