Just two weeks ago, Bank of America's Chief Investment Strategist Michael Hartnett came out with what was more or less the most apocalyptic big bank forecast for the coming year. In it, he predicted that the market would not only peak in the first half of 2018, and that there would be a flash crash "a la 1987/1994/1998" in just a few months.
Authored by Tom Luongo,
I’ve been asked by a few subscribers to further discuss the potential effect of the major exchanges starting up futures trading in Bitcoin. Last month the CME Group and the CBOE – Chicago Board of Exchange — announced they would begin trading futures contracts in Bitcoin due to popular demand.
image courtesy of CoinTelegraph
The bubble in sovereign bonds is looking dangerously close to popping.
And ironically, what could burst it is the very thing Central Banks have been pursuing aggressively for the last 9 years: inflation.
As I explain in my bestselling book The Everything Bubble, Treasury yields adjust to account for inflation. The relationship is not perfect as bonds are also priced based on economic activity. However, the fact remains, if the rate of inflation spikes, Treasury yields rise as well to account for this.
You can see this in the chart below:
Submitted by Rudy Havenstein
After years of seeing terrible market news and commentary, I’m pretty jaded, but when I saw the recent Marketwatch op-ed, “Janet Yellen’s true legacy is her focus on middle-class wages” (by Tim Mullaney), I thought such nonsense needed a reponse that went beyond 280 characters. (Half of Mullaney’s article is an anti-Trump rant, which is fine, and which I will ignore).
"If something is nonsense, you say it and say it loud."– Nassim Taleb
Everyone knows that tech stocks are - or at least until investors realized that tax reform is a fiasco for the tech sector, were - the darlings of the market, resulting in the biggest concentration of hedge fund holders with a record number of HFs holding the 5 FAANG stocks; at the same time far fewer are aware that while the tech space trades at less than 50% of its peak "dot com" valuations, it is the small and mid caps that have been the best performing, not to mention most overvalued sectors in recent years.