JC Penney surprised The Street and the entire retail industry tonight with the sacking of Ron Johnson, during whose brief tenure on top roughly a billion dollars and several decades worth of customer goodwill had been exploded into the aether, like an old stadium wired with dynamite and blown to bits. This was demolition work,…

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Merrill Lynch Wealth Management is out with their new monthly CIO Report in which they make a some recommendations on how we should be thinking about the bond market. The bottom line seems to be that Merrill analysts think there will be plenty of time to pick up on a rise in rates given the…

Here’s Brian Gilmartin at Trinity Asset Management on a new record you’ve not yet heard about: The “forward 4-quarter” earnings estimate for the SP 500 is as of April 5th, 2013, $115.25, a record high for the key benchmark. The SP 500 is trading at 13.5(x) that forward estimate. The earnings yield on the SP…

Last week PIMCO held a Cyclical Outlook Webcast which took a 30,000 foot overview of some of the important drivers for the 2013 macro picture. Leading the discussion was Saumil Parikh CFA, who is a managing director, portfolio manager and a member of the PIMCO Investment Committee. He also leads the firm’s cyclical economic forums….

Full disclosure: Our client portfolios have been riding the Japanese stock trade since the second week in January. When the leadership of one of the largest economies in the world decides to explicitly set out upside targets for their stock market, I don’t argue. Last night the Nikkei exploded yet again – another 2.8% gain…

Over at the Mutual Fund Observer’s April monthly issue, David Snowball annotates and adds to a semi-complete list of Forbes billionaire listees who’ve made their bones in mutual funds… *** Forbes magazine published their annual list of “The Richest People on the Planet” (03/04/2013), tracking down almost 1500 billionaires in the process. (None, oddly, teachers…

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