Saturday, April 07, 2018
The Biggest Weakness Facing US Real Estate / Housing-Market / US Housing
Right now, Millennials are the largest cohort of homebuyers in America.And even though they’re waiting longer to get married, start a family, and buy a home… and they’re more likely to skip buying a starter home and opt for a larger property…
They have almost ZERO interest in the massive McMansions the Baby Boomers built. Those behemoths cost a fortune to maintain, they typically lack the desirable open floor plans and high-end amenities Millennials want, and they’re usually located in hellish suburbia, far away from the hip neighborhoods and fun activities.
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Saturday, April 07, 2018
Looking at My US Housing Market “Doomsday” Map / Housing-Market / US Housing
Jeff was a small business owner in New Hampshire. One Tuesday afternoon, his neighbor called…“You need to get home NOW! There’s a dumpster in your yard, a padlock on your door, and a bunch of guys are ransacking your house!”
Completely panicked, Jeff dropped everything and raced home. When he got there, he found most of his family’s possessions either in a heap in the front yard or tossed inside the dumpster.
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Saturday, April 07, 2018
Why is US Healthcare So Costly? / Politics / Healthcare Sector
One of the Baby Boomers biggest concerns about retirement is the cost of healthcare.It’s a big problem.
I have a concierge doctor, who I pay a fixed annual fee. This gets me free visits and discounts on blood tests and other things I need. On top of that, I have a high–deductible insurance policy that only covers unexpected costs over $6,000, like if I have a heart attack or something.
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Saturday, April 07, 2018
Jarvis Cocker Addresses the Crowd at Sheffield City Hall Anti Tree Felling Protest / Local / Sheffield
Pulp front man Jarvis Cocker addresses an estimated crowd of 4000 Sheffield anti street tree fellings campaigners at the "Get Off My Tree!" protest at Sheffield City Hall after the campaigners had marched around the city centre on the 7th April 2018.
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Saturday, April 07, 2018
Looking at Real Estate Prices in Major World Cities / Housing-Market / US Housing
£593,369 – the average price of a house in London in January! (That’s about $829,000.)$1 million plus – what 400 square foot condos go for in Vancouver!
$1.5 million – the cost of a median house in San Francisco!
$20 million – for a 2,000-square foot penthouse condo with a view of Central Park!
Who the hell can afford prices like these?
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Saturday, April 07, 2018
U.S. Dollar: Why It Pays to Use the Elliott Wave Model / Currencies / US Dollar
See the signs that could’ve helped you nail two junctures in the greenback's trend
The legendary football coach Vince Lombardi believed that a winning team is built on mastering the game's basics -- so much so that at the start of the season he would "remind" veteran players, "Gentlemen, this is a football."
Lombardi would even take them out to the field, discuss the boundaries and remind the players that the goal is to get the football into the end zone.
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Saturday, April 07, 2018
As the Gold, Stocks, and Bond Markets Macro Turns… / Stock-Markets / Financial Markets 2018
We began months ago, noting the 3 Amigos destined for their goals. Here’s a post from November 2017 explaining the macro fundamentals involved:
Updating the 3 Amigos of the Macro
- Amigo #1 (SPX vs. Gold): Either reach major theoretical resistance (it’s a ratio, after all) or abort mission by establishing a downtrend.
- Amigo #2 (10yr yield to 2.9% and 30yr yield to 3.3%): Destinations reached!
- Amigo #3 (also known as the slower, dumber Amigo, the 10yr-2yr Yield Curve): Still on his journey, flattening. The trouble would be indicated by steepening.
Saturday, April 07, 2018
New Silver Bull Market Coming / Commodities / Gold and Silver 2018
Silver has been dead money over the past year or so, relentlessly grinding sideways to lower. That weak price action has naturally left this classic alternative investment deeply out of favor. Silver is extremely undervalued relative to gold, while speculators’ silver-futures positions are extraordinarily bearish. All this has created the perfect breeding ground to birth a major new silver bull market, which could erupt anytime.
Silver’s price behavior is unusual, making it a challenging investment psychologically. Most of the time silver is maddeningly boring, drifting listlessly for months or sometimes years on end. So the vast majority of investors abandon it and move on, which is exactly what’s happened since late 2016. There’s so little interest in silver these days that even traditional primary silver miners are actively diversifying into gold!
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Saturday, April 07, 2018
21 Trillion Reasons to Own Gold / Commodities / Gold and Silver 2018
Do you know how much a trillion is (we refer here to the short scale)? A billion is hard enough to imagine, much less a trillion. But let’s try. We can write it as 1,000,000,000,000 – that’s a 1 with twelve zeroes. In other words it’s million million, or ten to the twelfth (1012). One trillion of dollars in $100 dollar bills would stack up to about 631 miles high. Given that the average annual income in the U.S. is around $50,000, Joe Schmo would have to save 20 million of years (and not consuming at all) to stockpile a trillion dollars. Sounds enormous, right? So now multiply it by 21 and you will obtain the new level of the U.S. federal debt (here you can watch a movie visualizing the U.S. debt of $20 trillion).
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Friday, April 06, 2018
Bitcoin Not Quite Worthless, Potentially Profitable / Currencies / Bitcoin
Is Bitcoin worthless? Depreciation brings such questions as it has in the past. Bitcoin traders might be worried by such statements. But should they be anxious? In the whirlwind of opinions, we can find a theme which might allow profits on our hypothetical positions to grow even further.
The fact that Bitcoin is going down prompts all sort of analyses to come out. No big surprise that some of them are pretty bearish. In a piece on CNBC, we read:
Bitcoin is likely to fare worse than other assets in the coming months because it has no fundamental worth, an investment research firm said in a note Thursday.
London-based Capital Economics explained that the cryptocurrency has been quite closely correlated to the S&P 500 since the price started to fall from its record high at the end of last year.
Friday, April 06, 2018
Soccer World Cup: Will it help the Russian Stock Market? / Stock-Markets / Stock Markets 2018
Dear Investor,
You may be following sporting events as passionately as you follow market price trends. Or perhaps you’re not a sports fan, and you’re only interested in the stock market?
Either way, there is an exciting question about what effect big international sporting events have on share prices. The country that hosts Olympic Games or soccer World Cup draws huge media attention, the domestic mood improves, and big investment projects are carried out. All of this can affect the stock market.
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Friday, April 06, 2018
Why Are Markets Going Bonkers? Central Bankers Tried to Corner the Bond Market / Interest-Rates / US Bonds
The big questions being tossed around Wall Street today are: why are markets such a mess? Why are we getting these wild swings?
The reality is that the markets are NOT a mess. These are actually normal healthy markets. Healthy markets move, sometimes a lot in a small span of time.
The real issue is that from ’09 until recently, the market was completely artificial because Central Banks cornered ALL risk by cornering the sovereign bond market.
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Friday, April 06, 2018
Stock Market Update: S&P 495 Versus The Big 5 FANG Stocks / Stock-Markets / Stock Markets 2018
We have been marveling at the outperformance of the biggest five companies in the S&P 500 (Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Facebook) for some time (see our May 5, 2017 Commentary, “The S&P 500 or The S&P 495?”). Technology has almost single-handedly driven the equity market into an extraordinary bubble. Tech had been red hot since the January 2016 equity market correction. Tech was hot, but now it is not.
Enthusiasm for the mega cap tech stocks even provoked the creation of a new index, the NYSE FANG+ Index. The equally-weighted index includes ten companies which the market has fallen in love with: Apple, Netflix, Google, NVIDIA, Amazon, Tesla, Baidu, Alibaba, Facebook, and Twitter. The chart below shows the FANG index relative to the Russell 3000. These ten stocks almost DOUBLED the broad market performance in two years time.
Friday, April 06, 2018
How I Learned Cryptos and Became the Ethereum Whisperer / Currencies / BlockChain
Ryan Wilday : While we still await the crypto bottom, I want to start this week's article off with a personal narrative. I owe my current working life to ethereum.
In 2016, I was a practicing design strategist for Samsung while trading as a hobby. In fact, I had already been trading for two decades when I decided to continue my study of the market by learning Elliott Wave Theory as a member of elliottwavetrader.net. Soon after that, I started using my new knowledge with ethereum (ETHUSD), then a new coin.
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Thursday, April 05, 2018
As Volatility Spikes, Here’s What Could Be Ahead for Gold and Silver / Commodities / Gold and Silver 2018
The shift from low to high volatility in the markets is on. And almost by default, that’ll include gold and silver, since they’re inversely correlated to stock markets most of the time.
We’ve already seen this at work. The S&P 500 fell 2.2% on April 2, and in response, gold rose 1.2% and silver 1.6%.
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Thursday, April 05, 2018
Stock Market Bulls Happier Again, but... / Stock-Markets / Stock Markets 2018
Bulls regained their strength on Wednesday, as stocks retraced Monday's sell-off following lower opening of the trading session. The S&P 500 index extends its short-term consolidation despite trade war, interest rate hikes fears. So, is medium-term bullish case valid again?
The U.S. stock market indexes gained 1.0-1.5% on Wednesday, following much lower opening of the trading session, as investors' sentiment improved after rebounding off recent local lows. The broad stock market broke above the level of 2,600 again and got closer to 2,650 mark. The S&P 500 index trades 7.9% below January 26 record high of 2,872.87. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 1.0%, and the technology Nasdaq Composite gained 1.5%, as big cap tech stocks were relatively stronger than the broad stock market yesterday.
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Thursday, April 05, 2018
Gold Price Set For Sparkling Rally / Commodities / Gold and Silver 2018
Latest Price – $1340.20
Pattern – price looks to have been consolidating these past few months and as price rose into this consolidation pattern it should leave the same way – up. Breaking below the low of this consolidation phase at $1303 could be one area to place stops.
Bollinger Bands – price found support three separate times at the lower band. I doubt there will be a fourth time and price looks to have recently found support at the middle band.
Thursday, April 05, 2018
Stock Markets Rise Impressive as Expected at 200 DMA: What Next ? / Stock-Markets / Stock Markets 2018
We had expected the double bottom on stock market to result in a significant bounce. Read our report here: Markets to rise. The stock market staged an impressive upside turnaround today. After opening 500 points lower this morning, the Dow Industrials ended the day 230 points (0.96%) higher. That's a gain of more than 700 points from its opening price. Stock indexes gained roughly 3% from their sharply lower opening this morning. The fact that those upside turnaround took place at their 200-day averages was especially impressive. The Dow Industrials scoring an upside reversal day from just above its 200-day line. Initial overhead for the Dow to overcome is at 24,400. S&P 500 closing well above its 200-day average after opening below it this morning. That's a very encouraging sign. Initial overhead resistance for the SPX is at 2674. A close above that initial barrier would be an even more encouraging sign. The Nasdaq Composite Index also find support near its 200-day average. The Nasdaq was the day's strongest index with help from biotech and technology stocks. Small caps also had a strong day.
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Thursday, April 05, 2018
USD/CAD – Happy and Profitable Bears, EUR/USD – Breakdowns and Their Implications / Currencies / Forex Trading
Yesterday, the U.S. dollar moved sharply lower against its Canadian counterpart, which took the exchange rate to our next downside target. Thanks to the seller’s attack, we noticed a potential pro-bearish formation on the horizon, which can make positions even more profitable…
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Thursday, April 05, 2018
Adaptive Dynamic Learning Predicts Massive Stock Market Bottom / Stock-Markets / Stock Markets 2018
Our research team at Technical Traders Ltd. has been hard at work trying to identify if this recent downside price move is more concerning or just a rotational move. The recent global news regarding the US/China trade tariffs as well as the fallout that started nearly two weeks ago in Technology with Facebook, Snap and others has spooked the markets. Our additional research shows that China and Asia are extremely fragile at the moment and the global Central Bankers as well as the Real Estate market could be key to any future unraveling of the markets.
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