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.
October 27, 2024
You can always tell when portfolio managers are hard at play, immersed in an epic circle jerk that has become more tediously familiar with each passing week. And so it went on Friday, as money migrated for no discernible reason from certain, temporarily disfavored stocks to flavor-of-the-day hotties. It seemed almost as though the chimpanzees […]
Read the full commentary →October 20, 2024
Wall Street has gone all-in for Trump, piling up such extravagant gains in the last few weeks that one might wonder what bold miracles investors expect of him. More likely, unfortunately, is that within a year or two of taking office, he will be overwhelmed by the collapse of a financial bubble that required only […]
Read the full commentary →October 13, 2024
[I can’t stomach news reports that take Kamala Harris’s candidacy seriously, especially articles suggesting with brazen implausibility that she is polling dead-even with Trump in some important swing states. Fortunately for those creeped out by all the tilted campaign coverage, my colleague James Howard Kunstler has compressed everything you need to know about the election […]
Read the full commentary →October 6, 2024
If you can keep a cool head while everyone around you is panicking, perhaps you don’t understand the situation. That’s what they say, anyway. It is exactly what we saw last week when stocks barely shrugged even as the shooting war in the Middle East took another baby step toward nuclear conflagration. The oil markets […]
Read the full commentary →September 29, 2024
Expect stocks to continue their heedless waft into outer space until the election. They would not likely do so if investors even remotely imagined Kamala Harris might win. James Kunstler provided the most succinct reason we’ve heard for why this is not going to happen: “The people in this land are finally sick of a […]
Read the full commentary →September 22, 2024
The stock market went bonkers following the Fed’s first rate-cut since March 2020, but it’s more than a little tempting to sell the news. A return to easing had been rumored for the last couple of years, but with a pitchfork mob threatening to descend on the Eccles Building, Fed Chairman Powell finally gave in […]
Read the full commentary →September 15, 2024
The so-called ‘wealth effect’ is the Tulipmania of this era on steroids, creating untold sums of money from speculative spume. If materializing vast quantities of spendable cash is the goal, a revved-up wealth effect makes the Fed Open Market Committee look like a ladies’ luncheon club. Indeed, it can take long months or even years […]
Read the full commentary →September 8, 2024
I continue to believe the bull market’s fate can be divined simply by paying close attention to price action in Microsoft shares. The company is not only the second-largest in the world by capitalization, slightly behind Apple; it is also the most important. That’s because its huge stream of recurring subscription revenues from Windows and […]
Read the full commentary →August 25, 2024
[I’m taking a summer break, so this will be my last commentary until after Labor Day. It will be the usual busman’s holiday for me, however, and actionable ‘touts’ for popular symbols will be updated ‘round-the-clock as always. Some recommendations will be accessible to non-paying subscribers, so check the home page regularly, especially if stocks […]
Read the full commentary →July 21, 2024
Bears shouldn’t get their hopes too high just because the S&P 500 plummeted for three straight days last week. The selloff seemed tightly scripted, given that the Dow Industrials were rising just as sharply at least part of that time. This is shown in the chart above, which captures price action on Thursday. The implication […]
Read the full commentary →July 15, 2024
Stories about San Francisco’s death appear to have been exaggerated. I arrived there Saturday for a five-week stay, a getaway from Florida’s insufferable summer heat. It didn’t take me long to recall why, at age 28, I came to San Francisco and stayed until I was 50. For one, the weather rarely turns hot, even […]
Read the full commentary →July 7, 2024
The dog days of summer have returned with a vengeance to Florida this year, especially in my home. The air conditioner’s condenser coil sprang a leak, which is hardly unusual considering that it’s eight years old. What is unusual, and causing more than a little inconvenience, is that the broken part will take a month […]
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