August 25, 2020 | Daily JAM |
Part 3A: Strategies and Picks for the less risky end of a retirement portfolio Part 3 of my Special Report : "Meeting Your Retirement Challenge," which will focus on 5 concrete steps that you can take in your retirement portfolio. In this, Part 3A, I'm going to begin...
May 11, 2020 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing, Short Term |
Due to a quirk in the Federal Reserve calendar, the central bank doesn't meet in May. (Next meeting June 10; last meeting April 29.) That means the Fed has lots of time to jawbone the financial markets and Congress in an effort to get Washington to provide more fiscal...
May 4, 2020 | Daily JAM |
Okay, the Treasury actually will need to borrow only $2.99 trillion, but close enough, no? It will still be a record. The previous record for borrowing in a single quarter was $530 billion in the July to September 2008 quarter in the fallout from the global financial...
April 24, 2020 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
No big moves. No major disruptions. No threats of meltdowns. Today has been a welcome breather, a bit of stability, for  market that's had more than its share of excitement this week. So far. It's only 1:30 p.m. in New York. And we could see selling or buying before...
April 15, 2020 | Daily JAM, PANW |
Yesterday in my post "What do you do when the market is insane and you're not?" I argued that one of the dangers in a very volatile market with strong--and temporarily profitable--short-term trends is that we'll give in to the pressure to do something--and do...
April 6, 2020 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
A rally in European stocks that took the  STOXX 600 index up 3% in morning trading has extended to New York. At noon New York Time today, the Standard & Poor's 500 was up 5.65% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average was ahead 5.66%. The NASDAQ Composite had gained...
April 1, 2020 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
Not much mystery to today's selling. Investors and traders were trimming positions--or more--ahead of tomorrow's report on initial claims for unemployment. Last week brought a record 3.28 million new claims for unemployment as the coronavirus and "shelter in place"...
March 20, 2020 | Daily JAM, Short Term |
Let me emphasize that "for the week." The storm of bad news continued today with the European Union saying that the 2020 recession in that bloc may be as bad as 2009. Goldman Sachs warned that the U.S. economy may shrink 24% year over year in the second quarter. Oil...
March 17, 2020 | Daily JAM, Special Reports |
The definition of a bear market is rather simple: It's a drop of 20% or more from the market high. By this standard we've recently moved into a bear market on all the major U.S. stock indexes--and indeed on all the major overseas indexes with the exception, for the...
March 11, 2020 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing, Short Term, Volatility, You Might Have Missed |
As of 1:45 p.m. in New York the Standard & Poor's 500 is down 4.62% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average is off 5.13%. The NASDAQ Composite is lower by 4.40% and the Russell 2000 small cap index, with its heavy load of smaller U.S. oil producers, has lost 5.23%....
March 8, 2020 | Daily JAM |
...the stock market to hang on conditions in the credit markets--and not in a good way. While, normally (historical archives do indeed confirm that there once were normal times), falling bond yields push stock valuations higher (lower yields make stock more attractive...
March 6, 2020 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
By now I assume you know that today was another brutal day for U.S. stocks (although markets moved up significantly in the last hour.) The Standard & Poor's 500 closed down another 1.71% and the Dow Jones Industrials dropped 0.98%. The NASDAQ Composite was lower...