Business

After many prominent blow ups in the retail and consumer space in the past week, moments ago Nordstrom was the latest casualty of the US consumer's unwillingness to spend money when the company reported Q1 EPS of $0.26, missing consensus estimates of $0.46 by nearly half, and about a third of what the company earned last year despite relatively flat revenues of $3.25 billion which also missed expectations of $3.29 billion. Comparable sales dropped -1.7% on estimates of an unchanged print.

Seriously...

Stocks were mixed today -Trannies and Nasdaq tumbled, the S&P ended marginally red and Dow barely held green.. Stocks were saved in the pre-NYMEX ramp from crude...

While oil bulls were delighted by yesterday's DOE news of an inventory drawdown refuting the prior day's API news of a major build, what was ignored was the build in Cushing storage (more on that shortly), which according to Genscape hit a utilization just shy of 80%, or more than 70 million barrels, a record high since Genscape began monitoring the hub in 2009.

As reported earlier on Pitchbook, regulators are venturing into fintech targeting online lending platforms.  Numerous lending platforms evolved post financial crisis in order to extend credit to millions of Americans that normal banks couldn't extend credit to, or just flat out wouldn't extend credit to.

As is natural with internet companies, though, the methodologies employed evolved leaving banks antiquated; they can't (and couldn't, and won't be able to) compete given their cost to issue the dollar.

What's one to do when you can't compete?

At the SALT conference, MB Advisors founder and CEO Milton Berg gave an epic interview with Erik Schatzker in which Berg predicted that we are on the verge of a 30 year bear market in both equity and fixed income, and he also gave some sage advice to the average retail investor on what to do with their money at this point.

This is how Milton Berg explains his prediction