One of the obvious effects of endless zero-percent interest rates and QE has been the chase for yield. This has allowed a great many borrowers to tap the credit markets and it has encouraged a a new boom of covenant-light lending (meaning lesser protections for hungry creditors) as well as a jump in junk bond…

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True Blood actress Amelia Rose Blair ironically rings the closing bell of trading yesterday at the Nasdaq – which had dropped 3.1% on the week, its third straight week of losses.  Here were the most read posts on TRB this week, in case you missed them: The Most Important Difference Between 2007 and 2014 Quack Quack:…

It certainly could be, but the odds do not favor it. Statistically speaking, it is far more likely that a run-of-the-mill correction is now underway and working its way through each sector of the market, to varying degrees of severity. Counter-trend rallies are sharp and short (think Wednesday), which is fairly characteristic of a defined…

The sell-off continues as JPMorgan announces a rare miss, futures down more than five handles and looking listless. This despite the fact that Wells Fargo was able to beat. Wells is basically a GSE at this point. They’re doing a third of the nation’s mortgages, a ton of boring branch banking and then a whole…

Howard Marks (Oaktree) is on the short-list of every serious investor’s must-read list and this month’s new memo demonstrates exactly why. In it, Marks talks about the choice that all investors must make at the outset – to be extraordinary and run the risk of massive failure, or to be ordinary and merely get by…

This is a bit of a coming out party for my colleague and friend Michael Batnick. Michael is Ritholtz Wealth Management’s director of research and he’s been working with Barry and I since the fall of 2012. Much of what we do as an investment firm would be impossible if not for his work and…

The first quarter of this year has definitely frustrated just about everyone. The sectors that large cap mutual fund managers were overweight (like Consumer Disc) were the big under-performers while the sectors no one wanted anything to do with (Utilities, anyone?) absolutely kicked ass. Merrill’s Equity and Quant Strategy team tells that less than a…

Hot Trend Alert: IPOs aren’t cool anymore. Stuffed-to-the-gills investors literally cannot eat another bite, and yet the dishes continue to come flying out of the kitchen at Chez Wall Street. Early-stage investors see that the getting is now as good as it will ever be and private equity sponsors are racing to dump assets into…