Holding the Line

Holding the Line

  Supply and demand. It’s probably the oldest idea in economics. When buyers outnumber sellers, prices go up. When sellers outnumber buyers, prices fall. It’s intuitive enough that most people learned it long before they ever thought about investing. But here’s...
Expensive Ingredients

Expensive Ingredients

  When you want to know if the stock market is expensive, the obvious move is to look at the price-to-earnings ratio. You know, the so-called P/E Ratio. Divide today’s price by today’s earnings, and you’ve got a number. Simple enough. But there’s a problem:...
From Fear to Friend

From Fear to Friend

  There’s a strange thing that happens in markets. The moments that feel the most uncomfortable — like when volatility is spiking and every headline seems worse than the last — are often the moments that have historically been the most rewarding for patient...
Feeling the Heat

Feeling the Heat

  There’s a reason oil prices dominate the headlines every time a geopolitical crisis breaks out. Oil touches almost everything. It fuels the trucks that move our goods, the factories that make them, and the planes that carry the people running the businesses....
Measuring the Tide

Measuring the Tide

  You can kind of think of the stock market as existing in one of two states, either above water or below water. By that, I’m referring to the market’s trend. Is it generally moving higher, or drifting lower? To put some structure around that idea, we can look at...
Dow Disagreement

Dow Disagreement

  Sometimes good investing comes down to spotting clues. And like a good detective, the most important clues are often not what something is doing, but what it isn’t doing. That’s the idea behind this week’s indicator. In technical terms it’s called divergence,...