The brick-and-mortar retail "ice age" is quickly enveloping traditional grocers in its big chill.

As if more brick-and-mortar competition on the ground isn't bad enough, grocers are now being forced to chase customers who are tired of old-style consumer packaged goods (CPG). They are being wooed away by fresh food upstarts, meal-kit delivery services, "basket bandits," and the Amazon.com Inc. army with its never-ending onslaught of online marauders.

Competition and structural disruptions in the $649 billion grocery space (as of 2016's total revenues), with its average profit margin of barely 2%, are going to create new winners and kill off the slow-moving, undercapitalized, and overly indebted big-name grocers.

When it comes to profits, I aim high. My readers do, too.

In fact, if you're reading this now, you may be one of the readers I'm thinking of. I have heard time and time again from readers who have used my advice here to make serious profits. The ones who have stuck with me the longest are the same ones who have seen the biggest gains roll into their bank accounts, and nothing makes me happier.

For those of you who still have doubts, or are perhaps new to my services, I want to take the time to answer a question I've been getting a lot lately.

We tend to set our lofty sights on stocks that are heading south… but there are absolutely forces that can still push those stocks higher. If the market's going gangbusters and everybody's gung ho about stocks going to the moon, even crap stocks can (and often do) get pulled up, too.

In my mind, there are three distinct reasons that stocks that should be trampled on and trampled out of go up.

Seriously, someone please tell Kevin Mansell – Kohl's Corp.'s triple-threat chairman, president, and chief executive officer – that he's wrong, wrong, wrong.

While the rest of the bricks-and-mortar retailers in America are shedding stores as fast as they can (though not fast enough for some of them to beat debt collectors to bankruptcy court), Kohl's triple-threat-to-the-company is actually adding new old-fashioned physical stores to the mid-tier retailer's lineup.

Are 1,154 stores in 49 states not enough?

Maybe Mansell is trying to pick up some of the stores Macy's is closing… as well as Target, Wal-Mart, and JCPenney.

Hey, Kevin, I've got Eddie Lampert on the phone. He says he's got a few hundred Sears and Kmart stores he's looking to unload before Sears declares bankruptcy. How many do you want?

In a desperate gambit to heat up Kohl's sales in the retail ice age, to escape what I'm calling an extinction-level event, the company's lead sled dog is dragging the retailer straight off of a cliff.

Why is he doing this, and what's going to happen to Kohl's? And, my favorite question, how much can you make off of his chilling move?

The Sears story isn't just the story of what's happening to two American icons of retail, or what's happening to bricks-and-mortar retail in the age of online shopping.

It's also the story of the pensioners who will suffer from the company's demise. It's the story of another 140,000 jobs about to be lost. It's a story about asset-stripping.

In short, Sears' downfall is the story of how hubris and financial engineering failed retired workers, current employees, customers, and investors.

And it could be your story, with a happy ending, when you know how to profit from Sears' death.

As banks report earnings this quarter, investors and the media seem anxious about their prospects.

They should be.

Even though JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo beat analysts' consensus estimates when they all reported April 13, the headline numbers don't tell the real story.

Banks themselves had steadily walked down analysts' expectations for almost three weeks leading up to the start of earnings releases, so it shouldn't have come as a surprise that they magically beat forecasts.

Still, all the bank stocks got hit while the market slump put pressure on them.

The Federal Reserve System, America's private central bank, has a balance sheet problem. Actually, make that two related problems…

The Fed has painted itself into a dangerous corner, and the smartest way to get out of it is probably what it's least likely to do.

This past Wednesday, in a closed-door meeting between the director of President Trump's National Economic Council and the Senate Banking Committee, the NEC's Gary Cohn and Senator Elizabeth Warren apparently cozied up on the idea of separating commercial banking from investment banking.

Talk about strange bedfellows.

Gary Cohn, immediately prior to joining the Trump Administration, was president and COO of Goldman Sachs, one of the most powerful and profitable investment banks in history. He was, essentially, a general in the mega-bank oligarchy that many Americans believe directs the U.S. government.

Elizabeth Warren, on the other hand, was a Harvard Law professor who served as chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under President Barack Obama, was elected Senator of Massachusetts in 2012. She has arguably been the most vocal Big Bank basher in the past decade.

These polar opposites joining forces to dismantle the engine room of crony capitalism seems impossible.

So what's really going on here?