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Back in 1973 when the market was going to hell in a hand basket, one London market guru offered this cheery advice:
“You will need to invest in three things to survive next year’s economy: Cans of food, piles of gold krugerrands and a gun.”-WSJ: What to Do in a Stock Selloff, 11 Jul 2008

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Last night after the market closed I listened to a Bloomberg on the Money podcast with guest Louise Yamada, a well-known technical analyst. A lot of people in the fundamentals crowd stay away from looking at technicals, but in a market like this one, they cam provide some extra information.
Below are a few snippets [...]

Spain pulled a potential sale for 15-year bonds as the appetite for the issue just wasn’t there. Before the Euro, some in the European debt capital markets, where I worked, pejoratively called Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain, the PIGS. Because they had very poor government fiscal management before the Euro, as sovereign debtors, they had spreads which were very wide to German Bunds, then considered the gold standard of European sovereign debt issues.

But, after the Euro was agreed to, many in the bond markets went short Bunds and long PIGS as a ‘convergence’ play causing sovereign spreads to tighten — and with good reason as those countries got their fiscal houses in order and have generally performed well in the decade since.

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Yesterday, oil fell the most in one day since the start of the Gulf War in January 1991 to close at $136.03 in New York trading. Now is the time to evaluate whether we have seen the top in oil prices? On Thursday in my post “Oil close to $146” I said,
The price action [...]

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Zeitenwende, a German-language blog from Switzerland I subscribe to made a very good point this past holiday weekend after the Dow reached bear territory. U.S. investors had lost 20% on the Dow, but European investors would have lost much more.
The U.S. stock market return looks much worse in Europe than it does in the [...]

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We have lost one of the greatest stock pickers of all time. John Templeton passed away today.
Global investor and philanthropist John Templeton has died at a hospital in the Bahamas.
Spokesman Don Lehr said Templeton died Tuesday from pneumonia. He was 95.
Templeton created the John Templeton Foundation in 1987 to encourage scientific research. [...]

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One cannot expect double digit returns from the U.S. market over the medium term as there are significant headwinds impeding that from high P/E ratios, reversion to the mean, consumer price inflation, credit deflation, high debt, to a housing bust.
That said, I am not particularly bearish over the short-term. We have had a huge [...]

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Here are some charts from the latest issue of Barron’s. They have a readable article on bear markets (for those of you subscribed to it) as the Dow was down over 20% last week. That’s supposed to mark the beginning of a bear market as the chart below suggests.

First off, I have no [...]

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The tenor was downbeat at a panel put together by Pensions and Investments online that included well-known Boson-based investor Jeremy Grantham. Grantham is on record as being a sceptic of the current investment climate and sees the rally from 2003 as a bear market rally in the middle of a secular bear that started [...]

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In the Wall Street Journal today, Ted Forstmann, of LBO giant Forstmann and Little fame, has warned that the credit crisis is far from over. Forstmann, who presciently called the bubble in High Yield ad LBO financing twenty years ago, is a voice of great repute, because of his familiarity with high leverage debt [...]