Global Middle Class Glimmers in Distance
Recently, I told the story here of Louis Piro, a Mountain View barber who made millions by plowing every dollar he could save into the shares of growing companies that paid generous dividends. Following is another uncharacteristically bullish column that I wrote for the Sunday San Francisco Examiner around that time, in the late 1990s. It ran under the headline “New Global Middle Class Fuels Stocks,” and its thesis is that U.S. multinationals stood to benefit hugely from the rapid rise of an Asian middle class.
This scenario was delayed by the collapse of the Thai baht in 1997 and the severe Pacific Rim recession that followed. It now looks like it will be delayed even longer by a looming :
Second Great Depression in the U.S. You can judge for yourself whether such optimism is still warranted.
U.S. stocks have been in a scorching, vertical climb for months, confounding the bears and effortlessly vaulting the immediate expectations of the most ardent bulls. What factors might account for this powerful rally? Could there be forces at work besides the steady…
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Jubilant Traders Miss Another Ominous Sign
Yesterday morning, an hour into the new trading week, we covered a small short position in the Diamonds, booking a loss of $92 on some September put options. This speculative bet, initiated on the closing bell Friday, was inspired by a hunch that if Mr. Market really wanted to catch investors with their pants down, the Tuesday after Labor Day would be a perfect time to do it. Alas, even with news that should have been helpful in catalyzing a stock-market plunge, stocks trudged higher. The news concerned consumer credit, and it could have left no doubt about the dire condition of the American consumer. He in fact…
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Gold Waiting to Pounce on Summit’s Failures
With the G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh just two weeks off, we didn’t expect gold’s widely anticipated push past $1000 to be a piece of cake. Indeed, Bernanke & Friends are probably throwing everything they’ve got at gold right now to suppress its price. And for all we know, Uncle Sam has loaned every ingot (supposedly) in Fort Knox to carry-traders at J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs. The ability of these well-connected bullion bankers to borrow more or less unlimited quantities of physical gold is for them even better than a license to print money, since money itself is most surely not what it used to be. The feather…
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S&P Rally Nears a Key Benchmark
We’ll know soon whether stocks are about to continue blithely higher, since the S&Ps are stealing up on an important Hidden Pivot target disseminated to Rick’s Picks subscribers a while back. Specifically, we projected a potentially important top in the September E-Mini S&P contract at exactly 1053.00. Yesterday, the futures got as close as 1044.00 before retreating slightly in after-hours trading. The S&Ps and other broad indexes have now closed higher for five consecutive days, testing the resolve of bears while rewarding traders who have stayed with the bullish trend.