Thanks to BofA Merrill Lynch’s chief technician Stephen Suttmeier for this bit on the January Barometer, one of only a handful of truly useful calendrical indicators… January Barometer: As January goes, so goes the year Does the January Barometer work? Based on S&P 500 data going back to 1928, January is a good predictor of…

Acording to Morningstar, index funds’ market share (both mutuals and ETFs) has doubled in the last decade from 12% to 27%. Investors have been abandoning actively managed funds for years now – bu not across all categories equally. The article notes that some categories of active equity funds seem to be more susceptible to being…

My fave social media analyst, SunTrust’s Bob Peck, is out with a bullish report on Facebook shares this morning, with higher revenue and cash flow estimates along with an upped price target ($65 from $55). He sees five drivers of the stock from here: Five Factors Driving Increased Optimism. Our more bullish outlook is driven…

is interest rates that rise too quickly. …and Bird Flu. But on the rates thing – it is pretty important for us all to get up to snuff on how asset classes act during rate-rise cycles at this point.  I covered this a bit in my 2014 outlook piece this morning, but let’s also look…

A new year has just begun, let’s get our bearings… This isn’t a post full of table-pounding predictions or forecasts, this is just me thinking out loud. In the first part, I’ll sum up the current environment as I see it. In the second part, I’ll talk about some possible scenarios for the coming year…

  Cartoon by Tom Toles. Read Also: The Campaign for a Bigger Paycheck (New York Times Editorial Board)

  Source: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Morgan Housel writes a mock obituary for Long-Term Thinking, the personification of a concept that everyone on Wall Street pays lip service to publicly, but most can’t afford to think about in real life. Long-Term Thinking doesn’t get murdered in the Housel obit – rather he dies of neglect, in bed somewhere while you were…