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World stock markets were mostly lower overnight, following Wall Street's sell off last Friday. U.S. stock indexes are pointed toward weaker openings when the New York day session begins.
Gold prices are slightly lower in pre U.S.-session trading, amid a lack of fresh, bullish fundamental news to support the safe-haven metal.
In Dow Jones news today, the markets were mostly flat as investors wait to trade until after the long holiday weekend.
Oil prices and precious metal prices were able to climb today.
The Dow Jones news today is highlighted by stocks dropping in premarket hours after a round of international news yesterday.
Dow futures are down 31 points as markets digest OPEC's production cut extension and President Trump's chilly reception in Europe.
by Greg Madison
Twenty-year market veteran Chris Johnson made his bones as a quantitative analyst (imagine a rocket scientist who worked with stocks instead of, you know, rockets), using proprietary mathematical models to bull's-eye "seismic" market anomalies with triple-digit upside potential – and all so regular investors don't have to, of course.
Since April, his Seismic Profits Alert readers have had the opportunity to clean up, with gains of 223.6%, 190.6%, and 197.6% on really tiny 1% and 2% "earthquakes" in stocks like Best Buy Co. Inc. and Intuit Inc.
Then again, that's not really all that surprising: Chris' Seismic Profits Alert is basically designed to go after triple-digit winners every trading week.
Chris is smack-dab in the middle of one of the busiest times of the trading year right now, working on no less than five profit recommendations for his readers, but he had a few minutes for me to ask a couple of questions, re-introduce him to our Members, and talk about the unique way he looks at stocks.
by Shah Gilani
Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are all about relationships, so the marriage of ETFs and passive investing looks perfectly fine on the surface. But frighteningly, the basis of their relationship and the reason they look like they pair well will actually be their downfall.
There's the one thing you need to know about ETFs that you probably have no idea about.
I'm going to use a scary word to describe ETFs, although you won't hear the word used when it comes to ETFs anywhere else. That's because not many people understand that the word absolutely applies.
Before I began working for you folks, I served as a senior advisor to a dozen tech startups and sat on the board of a Silicon Valley venture capital firm (VC).
And when it comes to finding profit-producing tech investments before mainstream stock analysts do, that gives me a leg up on Wall Street.
In fact, it gives me a "secret" method.
Besides following the stock market and keeping my ear to the ground here in Silicon Valley, I spend hours each week intensely studying VC funding.
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(Kitco News) – World stock markets were mostly lower Wednesday, in the wake of the downdraft in U.S. equities that saw the biggest losses of 2017 on Tuesday.
U.S. stock indexes are pointed toward slightly lower openings when the New York day session begins.
Gold prices are trading slightly lower Wednesday but did hit a three-week high overnight.
As I explained on Tuesday and last week and last month and ad infinitum, U.S. stocks are in a bubble that has little to do with fundamentals or common sense and everything to do with sentiment, indexing, ETFs and the triumph of hope over experience. Investors are checking their brains at the door every morning and ignoring the lessons that hammer them time and again that stocks don't grow to the sky.
Do not be fooled.
I repeat. Stocks are in a bubble. And that means that sooner or later they are going to drop sharply. Saying this won't make me a lot of friends, but I have plenty of friends. My job is to make sure that the people who read me understand the truth about what is happening in the market. And the truth is that neither the economy nor corporate earnings justify a market trading at anywhere near current valuation levels.
A number of highly respected investors like Seth Klarman, manager of the highly successful Baupost Limited Partnerships, and Jeremy Grantham, whose firm has lost $40 billion in assets due to its negative views over the last year, believe we are in a bubble and prone to big losses in the near future. What you come to learn after investing as long as I have is that investors buy too late what they wish they would have bought when it was a lot cheaper and sell what they are going to need. Right now, fed by the frenzy for passive (i.e. mindless) investing, indexing and ETFs, they are doing precisely the opposite of what they should be doing.
Right now, investors should be doing two things: Getting out of overvalued, overleveraged stocks and shorting (or buying puts on) them instead. In particular, they should focus on the dying retail sector, and on other closely related sectors that will be dragged down with it – like food service and restaurants.
And this company will likely be one of the first to crumble…
by Shah Gilani
Snap Inc., the first tech IPO of 2017, is racing ahead at breakneck speed. As recently as November, one sell-side analyst thought Snap's coming out party could result in a whopping $45 billion valuation. As of Snap's roadshows in London on Monday and in New York yesterday, Snap's talked-down price range of $14-$16 values it […]
by Shah Gilani
Unfortunately for America, the track record of government officials coming out of Goldman Sachs to run the Treasury Department and the National Economic Council – two favorite haunts of the bank's former bigwigs – mirrors the unsavory track record of the bank itself.
It's not that Goldman Sachs people don't know how to make money or run the most powerful bank or country in the world… it's the matter of how they do it that should frighten you.
There's a slippery track record of Goldman alums who snaked their way around when they held government positions – that's how the phrase Government Sachs was born.
It's in your best interest to understand this history that looks doomed to repeat itself.
