December 31, 2017 | AMAT, Daily JAM, Stock Alerts |
I’m making Applied Materials (AMAT) my fifth day of Christmas pick. And I’m adding the stock to my long-term 50 Stocks portfolio today (for purchase on January 2.) Applied boasts an impressive global presence with an installed base of more than 30,000 tools and customer engineers stationed in nearly every chip-manufacturing facility in the world. The relationships that come with that installed base of tool and customer engineers is a huge competitive advantage in designing and introducing new generations of chip-making equipment.
December 29, 2017 | CHK, Daily JAM, FLR, GE, POT |
To subscribe to JAM you need to fill in some details below including, ahem, some info on how you'll pay us. A subscription is $199 (although if you're subscribing with one of our special offers it will be lower) for a year for ongoing and continuing access to the...
December 29, 2017 | Daily JAM, Notes You Need |
In my daily trawling through the market I come upon lots of tidbits of knowledge that I think are important to investors but that don’t justify a full post. I’ve decided to start compiling these notes here each day in a kind of running mini blog that I’m calling Notes You Need. Typical items resemble this post from today: “10:40 a.m.: Softbank Group along with Tencent Holdings, Sequoia Capital and Dragoneer Investment Group are buying existing shares in Uber from current shareholders. In addition Softbank will buy $1.25 billion in new preferred stock. The big advantage to the deal from Uber’s point of view is that the investment pretty much rules out any investment in rival Lyft from Softbank. Locking Lyft out of funding from Softbank came at a price, though, as the sale of existing shares values Uber at $48 billion, a haircut from the valuation of $69 billion in Uber’s last round of financing.”
December 29, 2017 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
Oil climbed to a two-and-a-half year high this morning. Judging from the general “there’s no news today so follow the trend” nature of trading this morning, the bump in oil prices is likely to be a reflection of a continued belief in solid global growth for the year ahead and a bet on the continued downward trend in the U.S. dollar.
December 28, 2017 | Daily JAM, NVDA, Stock Alerts |
To subscribe to JAM you need to fill in some details below including, ahem, some info on how you'll pay us. A subscription is $199 (although if you're subscribing with one of our special offers it will be lower) for a year for ongoing and continuing access to the...
December 28, 2017 | Daily JAM, Notes You Need |
In my daily trawling through the market I come upon lots of tidbits of knowledge that I think are important to investors but that don’t justify a full post. I’ve decided to start compiling these notes here each day in a kind of running mini blog that I’m calling Notes You Need. A typical post looks much like this entry from today: “10:20 a.m.: Cook County, the county that includes Chicago, has announced a lawsuit against makers of prescription opioid painkillers such as OxyContin and Percocet. The lawsuit cites the companies’ “coordinated, sophisticated, and highly deceptive marketing.” Cook County has seen a 70% increase in opioid-related deaths between 2015 and 2016.”
December 28, 2017 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
One expected and one surprising development as everybody digs deeper into the recently passed tax bill. The expected: Congress gave the IRS no time at all between passing the bill and the deadlines for putting its provisions to work. So it’s not at all surprising that there’s lots of confusion about how the new law will work. Take the question of whether tax payers in high tax states, who stand to get slammed next year can prepay their state and local taxe
December 27, 2017 | AAPL, Daily JAM, Stock Alerts |
To subscribe to JAM you need to fill in some details below including, ahem, some info on how you'll pay us. A subscription is $199 (although if you're subscribing with one of our special offers it will be lower) for a year for ongoing and continuing access to the...
December 27, 2017 | Daily JAM, Mid Term, Volatility, You Might Have Missed |
Black swan events in the financial markets are terrifying. By definition they’re extremely rare and extremely difficult to predict. Which wouldn’t be so scary if their effects weren’t so catastrophic. A 10% drop in the Standard & Poor’s 500 would certainly be painful–but it doesn’t rise to the category of a black swan. Neither does a 15% drop in the price of Bitcoins. Or a 20% drop in the price of Apple (AAPL). All these are relatively normal negative events. They’ve happened before. They happen relatively frequently. And in some cases–that of Bitcoin or the S&P 500, for example–they’re absolutely statistically normal for the market or a part of the market or a specific asset. No, the label “black swan’ is reserved for things like the 2008 global financial crisis that almost brought the world’s financial markets and its real economies to their knees. Or the Dot.com crash of 2000, which saw corporate giants such as Nortel Networks disappear from the economic landscape. Or the oil price crash of 2008 that saw oil soar to a high of $147 a barrel in July and then plunge to $32 by December. Given how devastating to a portfolio a black swan event can be, it seems, at first, surprising that most lists of “bad things that could happen in the year ahead” pretty much ignore this type of financial event.
December 26, 2017 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
The week in the markets will be dominated by something old and something new. The something old is trading. The relatively light volumes during the week between Christmas and News Year’s bring out the dedicated traders who see the low volumes as creating the potential for moving the market in one direction or another. Today the action has centered on Bitcoin.The something new is parsing the recently passed tax bill.
December 22, 2017 | Daily JAM |
U.S. stocks have had a great year in 2017. The Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index is ahead 18.66% for 2017 as of the close today, December 23. The NASDAQ Composite, heavy on tech stocks and financials, is ahead 28.2%. But there’s a good likelihood that you’ve got a tax loss or two–not everything you own is up for the year, probably, and not everything you own is up since you bought it way back whenever–and in a year like this tax losses can be especially valuable.
December 22, 2017 | Daily JAM, Notes You Need |
In my daily trawling through the market I come upon lots of tidbits of knowledge that I think are important to investors but that don’t justify a full post. I’ve decided to start compiling these notes here each day in a kind of running mini blog that I’m calling Notes You Need. A typical post looks much like this entry from today: 11:20 a.m.: Continued weak inflation in November. The PCE (Personal Consumption Expenditures) index rose 0.2% in November from October. Economists surveyed by Briefing.com had expected a 0.3% month over month increase. The Core PCE was up just 0.1% month over month. “The PCE Index is the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation measure. Year over year the Core PCE Index is up 1.5%.”
