Stock index futures are falling off a cliff as this morning’s reading on jobs noticeably missed consensus estimates. Now what have I been pounding the table about ever since “they” started talking healthcare reform, financial industry reform, penalty fees levied on banks, higher taxes on business owners, etc.? The real world fact that when you [...]

Heading into the last recession, far too many CEOs were blindly wallowing in the spoils of a long-in-the-tooth expansion and the it’ll-always-be-this-way curse of the human brain. They were in essence over-leveraged and over-confident – as if they’d lost site of the cyclicality of the economy – or, at a minimum, had no clue (like [...]

Take a look at Sunday’s headlines from a popular on-line news source: • Stocks to Tumble Another 20%, Stick to Cash • Stocks to Come Back With a Vengeance • 15% Correction Likely, But I’m Still Bullish • Banks to Drop 12-15%, Then Rebound in Multiples • Market to Rise 11-14% by Year-End • Sell [...]

Everyone seems to understand that the market’s supposed to take a 10%+ hit at least once a year. Yet when it comes, everyone seems to think something far worse than your garden variety correction is going on. And sometimes everyone’s right. More often however it’s been a natural consolidation – a paring of gains so [...]

I don’t think Sir John Templeton was kidding when he said “Bull Markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism and die on euphoria”. And I think Warren Buffet means it when he says “the time to buy is when there’s blood in the streets” or “I’m greedy when others are fearful [...]

Spoke with a friend last Friday who said he’d been reading a lot lately and had a gut feeling that this is all going to get very ugly very soon – that something inside was telling him we’re about to experience the kind of stock market plunge we saw in 2008. Our discussion then revolved [...]