You have probably noticed a change in tone at Credit Writedowns since about June, but a lot more in the past month or so. Once mildly bullish due to the deeply oversold levels this Spring, I have become increasingly alarmed at the unjustified strength of the recent market rally.
My most recent post explaining my concern, [...]

Stock markets are seriously overbought right now.  But, the rally in shares has been bolstered by better than expected economic data and earnings reports.  I first pointed to a rally in shares in March, but I didn’t get fully onboard until April (after all, people like Louise Yamada were still pointing to downside risk).
But, by [...]

Update: These clips have sadly been removed from YouTube.
Clips from the 1987 PBS Film called Trader featuring famed investor Paul Tudor Jones are catching everyone’s imagination all of a sudden.  Is it that we are all secretly worried about a sock market crash?  Who knows.  It’s entertaining nonetheless and is a good piece of financial [...]

Jeremy Grantham is out again with a very important investment strategy piece entitled “Boring Fair Price!”  He leads off by talking about how markets went from extremely overvalued a year ago to cheap back to a state which he considers fair value.  But, he sees the recent rally as a speculative rally which is a [...]

We’re not really hard wired for making money in the markets. We use a lot of gut instincts, heuristics and plain illogic in making decisions.  The result is sub-optimal investment performance. This is the nothing new as the field of behavioral economics has really moved to the forefront of academia with Daniel Kanheman receiving the [...]

This comes via David Rosenberg of Gluskin Sheff.

The week that was After four weeks of decline with a total loss of 7.0%, the equity market turned in a like-sized gain this past week re-igniting the bulls. With tech leading the way, the Nasdaq has managed to rally to a [...]

The Economist released its remarkably telling Big Mac Index this past weekend.  The index looks at the relative cost of Big Mac in various countries to gauge how over- or undervalued the currencies in those locales are.  Judging from this Index, there are some monster distortions in the currency markets right now.

The numbers marked [...]

While Tim Geithner is out in the Middle East making the obligatory rounds, professing support for a strong U.S. dollar, investment strategists are wondering aloud whether a weak U.S. dollar is really what the U.S. government wants.  David Rosenberg put out the following note over at Gluskin, Sheff.
It is the second anniversary of the credit [...]

Marc Faber was quoted in June as saying he expects a major move in financial markets, but is unclear which directions markets will turn.  His statements suggest to me he could be advising clients to go long volatility in anticipation of market turbulence.  This would usually be accomplished by buying options in high beta assets [...]

Here is a video released by Karl Denninger of Market Ticker in which he shows exasperation with CNBC’s pro-bullish bias.  He notes that CNBC used comments by Nouriel Roubini to suggest the economy is rebounding faster. Denninger sees this as a pattern at CNBC and brings up prior incidents of a similar nature.
For his part, [...]