Bullish and Bearish Bellwethers Just before the 1929 crash, Joseph Kennedy (father of President John F.) was supposed to have dumped all his stocks because a Wall Street shoeshine boy started giving him stock tips. Kennedy reasoned that, if even shoeshine boys were playing the market, there was no remaining, untapped demand to support stock...Read More
Obama Exits, Stage Right Left As the 2016 stock market rout deepens (the Dow is down over 400 pts. so far this am), shell-shocked investors are all wondering: when will the pain stop? Unfortunately, it’s not clear to me that it will be anytime soon. That’s because markets hate uncertainty, and the biggest uncertainty hovering...Read More
Contrarian Indicator: My Perfect, 7-for-7 Forecasting Record Want to make a fortune? Don’t follow my advice. Do the opposite. In the interest of full disclosure, herewith are all the market calls I got wrong the last few years (in my defense, so did almost every other so-called “expert”): 1. Stocks: Prediction: ↓ Actual: ↑ Explanation:...Read More
Hungry Twin Cities Buyers Face Limited Inventory Want to know what’s going on in the Twin Cities housing market now in a nutshell? It’s all in the arrows: Employment/Job Growth: ↑ Housing Inventory (Listings): ↓ Showings: ↑ Mortgage Rates: ↓ Mortgage Applications: ↑ Rents: ↑ Net it all out, and what emerges is a picture of...Read More
Sudden — & Unpredictable If major changes in interest rates are like seismic events, the “tremors” are intra-day mortgage rate changes. On a typical day, there are one or two; this Monday, there were six — all up. To be sure, the increments are small, and the current 30-year rate is (still) a historically low 3.75% (up...Read More
