February 2013

Aggressively Toe-Dipping, LOL

I’m still in full-on cringe mode after reading this piece in Pensions & Investing about pension fund managers refusing to admit that they’re buying stocks. They are – but they have to pretend that they’re not so that in hindsight, it won’t look like top-ticking after a huge rally. The article plays it straight but…

The bigger question than “Buy or Sell”

I find myself sending you over to my friend Carl’s work a lot these days, mainly because I find that with the market driving everyone crazy here at multi-year highs, people are freaking out and need to be calmed down. Carl is a zen master in real life and his work at the Behavior Gap…

What is the biggest advertising platform in the world?

MarketWatch has assembled an infographic slideshow and the slide below ranks the top web platforms by monthly unique users. But they missed the biggest one. They have Google on top of the pile with 191.4 million monthly US uniques. Except they left out the biggest one. The one that’s bigger than all the others. It’s…

The Constant Correction Call

There is always a correction coming. Always always always. In bull markets, corrections are to the downside when too much enthusiasm is baked in too quickly or an outlier event (terrorism, natural disaster, etc) rattles everyone’s confidence in the short-term. In bear markets, corrections are to the upside when widespread negativity gets ahead of how…

Think Twice Before Fading Barron’s Covers

Welcome to the stock market circa 2013, where everyone is a contrarian mastermind and every piece of optimism is an automatic sell signal. Everyone’s soooo clever with their magazine cover indicators. They saw the Barron’s cover from this Saturday and couldn’t wait to mock it, it’s almost like a reflex at this point. Anyway, here’s…

Meanwhile on Main Street…

The psychologically important Dow Jones Industrial Average is within inches of a new all-time high and Main Street is still completely clueless as to the how and why. They barely understand the what. In the meantime, market watchers, kneejerk contrarians and other assorted paper-trading pseudo-pundits would have you believe that we have reached some noteworthy…