This is the final full trading week before the election. I am going to take the opportunity to lay out the trends as I see them and the state of the market within the context of those trends. Starting with equities in the US. The SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY) is now oversold within the

Sometimes it’s “macro” time and sometimes it’s “micro” time. Micro time is generally how I refer to earnings season. That is normally when we can take a step back from the bigger picture themes such as interest rates, currencies, policy and stimulus and focus on what companies are saying about their business over the past

*This is a excerpt from the weekly note that PortfolioWise users receive every Tuesday* If you ignored the noise, or were at least aware of how the market was positioned relative to the prevailing narrative, last Friday was a day to become more aggressive on the long side of the portfolio. The SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY)

Dan Russo, Chief Market Strategist at Chaikin Analytics headlined his 10/12/20 newsletter to clients with the question: “Changing of the Guard?” He noted that our ETF Power Rank on the tech-heavy Invesco QQQ Trust, Series I ETF (QQQ) (ETF Home) fell from Bullish to Neutral while that of the small-cap oriented iShares Russell 2000 ETF

Four Ideas For Our Near-Zero Interest Rate “Sistine Chapel” Fixed-Income Market Question: What does the fixed income market have in common with the Sistine Chapel? Answer: The main action is on the ceiling. The Federal Reserve recently strengthened the scaffold holding us up by suggesting rate increases won’t come before 2023. And as shown in

Value For A Growth-Obsessed World: Six Infrastructure Plays I could understand how anyone who read my post last week, which suggested Defunding the Value Police, might come away with the idea that I’m anti-value, a spokesperson for the dark side. Not so, not at all. I’ve always been about value and still am. What I’m against

I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the market’s recent tech wreck caused the long dormant Value Police to run to the spotlight. Ignore them; they’re still wrong. Value can never work in isolation, but always works when joined with growth. Softbank shenanigans aside, I wouldn’t be at all if the market’s recent tech wreck

Led by Fama-French  and the Quant community, Wall Street has long considered Small-Capitalization to be a significant factor in and of itself. Not so! Fundamental assessment of businesses shows that large and small companies are structurally different and that all else being equal, smaller firms are riskier. Aiming at small-cap per se a risk-on choice;

There are lots of stocks out there that have the potential to become FANMAG-like superstars of tomorrow, and ETFs that invest in them. One can, however, wonder if such stocks and ETFs expose investors to the sort of value crash we experienced in 2000-02. Analyzing the Chaikin multi-factor Power Gauge model, I suggest that such

Creative destruction is the hallmark of progress. We can think of it as economic innovation. There is actually an entire page on Wikipedia devoted to it. You can check it out here. According to the site, it is a concept in economics which since the 1950s has become most readily identified with the Austrian-born economist

Having cut my teeth with High-Yield (Junk) bonds back in the heyday of the era, when Drexel Burnham and Michael Milken ruled the kingdom from the famous X-shaped Beverly Hills trading floor (with Milken holding down the center point) and annually feted courtiers with what later became dubbed “The Predator’s Ball” (if you haven’t heard

A little less than 4 weeks ago, I wrote a blog post exploring the responsiveness of ETFs to changes in rating. Based on that analysis, I concluded that there were 8 ETFs ripe for action. They were: INVESCO DYNAMIC MARKET ETF (PWC) SPDR S&P 400 MID CAP GRW ETF (MDYG) INVESCO S&P SMCP CONSR DISCR