Uncannily Accurate Forecasts for Stocks & Commodities
Daily Commentary
Rick Ackerman’s daily market commentary — blunt, specific, and free of Wall Street spin. Browse the full archive below.
November 28, 2021
Friday felt like a Pearl Harbor attack on Wall Street. Since when did a Thanksgiving Friday fill investors with dread and fear? The day was supposed to have passed quietly, with second-string prop desks locked on a glide path into what remained of the four-day holiday. Instead, the Dow plunged by 900 points, closing near […]
Read the full commentary →November 21, 2021
Did you notice last week’s tone change? The whole, eternally benighted world of pundits, economists, Bloomberg news producers, forecasters et al. has been disbelieving the bond rally as the Fed’s ultimately unredeemable portfolio of Treasury debt has grown from merely massive to intergalactic in size. Now the talking heads are having to change their tune […]
Read the full commentary →November 14, 2021
John Doerr, the venture capital zillionaire, thinks America should go all-in on measures to control the weather. Although Doerr fears it may be too late to save Earth and its inhabitants from the ravages of global warming, he says a massive investment program would still be better than doing nothing. His role model is FDR, […]
Read the full commentary →November 7, 2021
Who could have predicted that a microchip shortage would threaten to seriously impair the global auto industry? And yet, here we are: assembly plants are unable to ship enough cars to meet demand, and buyers are facing six-month delays and steeply rising prices. This has pushed used-car prices beyond the reach of those who can’t […]
Read the full commentary →October 31, 2021
So much for seasonality. Bears were counting on the cyclical fury of autumn to rebuke revelers, but instead it is they who got rebuked, and badly. The stock market’s strong rally during the traditionally difficult month of October has left many wondering what it will take to pop the bubble. It is almost invariably a […]
Read the full commentary →October 24, 2021
The performance of Apple shares has been a reliable harbinger of where greed and hubris would take this seemingly invincible bull market next. Apple is the biggest-cap stock of them all, worth $2.5 trillion, and it has increasingly become a sure thing for institutional investors since bottoming a generation ago below $5. With its broad […]
Read the full commentary →October 20, 2021
Inflation fears are at a generational peak, pushing our stubbornly unfearful Fed chairman against a wall. He may yet prove right in saying inflation will be transitory, but for reasons that should comfort no one. In the meantime, the U.S. dollar seems resistant to the nervous chatter while Treasury bonds, although struggling for altitude, continue […]
Read the full commentary →October 10, 2021
If I had to pick one chart that shows why the bull market is probably not over, it would be the one above. To be sure, the 157.26 peak recorded by Apple shares a month ago was a great place for an important top to have occurred; this chart shows why. But THE top? I […]
Read the full commentary →October 3, 2021
The chart above shows how bull-market tops are made when nearly everyone is expecting one. That’s the case now — for so many good reasons that I won’t bother with a checklist. Just take my word for it: the bull is dying. Most of the reasons the pundits are giving would have us believe the […]
Read the full commentary →September 26, 2021
[Recently I wrote here that the world’s biggest financial institutions are in Evergrande muck up to their eyeballs, even if they claim that their exposure is small in relation to their respective assets. The trouble is, the supposed assets are as ethereal as Evergrande’s grotesquely inflated real estate holdings. In the guest commentary below, Shawn […]
Read the full commentary →September 19, 2021
Bears had a rare chance to get short with impunity last week — arguably the first such free-money opportunity since the bull market began more than 12 years ago. With the Evergrande saga unfolding in real time, shares appeared to be doing a Wile E. Coyote ahead of Friday’s opening. Their gravity-defying behavior reflected one […]
Read the full commentary →September 12, 2021
The weekend brought an autumnal breeze to much of the Eastern Seaboard, and with it raised hopes in some quarters that seasonality will trigger a long overdue avalanche in the stock market. Even a few bulls are hoping for this, since only a rip-snorting stampede out of shares can disperse the potentially explosive, hydrogen-saturated layers […]
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