Vintage Wine Turns Sour for Financiers

By Alex Daley and Doug Hornig, Casey Research

When the folks at a private equity firm gather at the holiday party refreshment table to talk about “vintage,” they aren’t commenting on the Château Pétrus.

The world of private equity financing doesn’t have high visibility, but it is big business behind the scenes. Unlike venture capital outfits – which provide startup money to very early-stage companies – those who play this game grab existing private companies, often through leveraged buyouts (LBOs). Each year’s investments are referred to as vintages, with some being more highly drinkable than…

Chris Potter: 21st Century Alchemy—Paper to Gold

Source: Interviewed by Karen Roche, Publisher, The Gold Report

Not only does Chris Potter stand by his claim that India’s big gold buy late last year was a game-changer, the way he explains it in this exclusive Gold Report, interview, it’s a 21st century take on the classic alchemist’s quest of old—transforming lead into gold. Nowadays, the alchemists are the central bankers of the world, and they’re successfully managing to turn the paper money their countries are producing (their devaluating currencies, that is) into the precious metal. Poof. There’s gold in them there rupees,…

Flat-Lined U.S. Economy

As February opened, stocks bounced back from a rough stretch that brought the S&P 500 below technical support levels and into an intermediate-term downtrend. The rally appeared to run out of steam today. Volume trends are also troubling, with recent sell-off days generally more active than bullish days. At the same time, any unexpected good news could spark more buying interest.

Earnings season is winding down with mixed reviews. More than 75% of the S&P 500 companies that have reported fourth quarter results managed to beat profit expectations, but few are showing higher revenues. Profits seem to be driven mostly…

Watch These Three Stock Market Warning Signals

The stock market does not turn on a dime. At least historically that’s been the case.

Take Japan as an impressive example …

At 10,300 the Nikkei is now 74 percent below its all time high of December 1989. On the long way down it has experienced many cyclical rallies, some of them amounting to gains of more than 100 percent!

All of them finally failed. Yet none did so by turning on a dime. There was always a distinctive topping process going on before the bear…

IVV: Buying the S&P 500 Without Commissions

Investors have plenty of ETF options to track major U.S. asset classes. The benchmarks sometimes have significant overlap, and in some cases more than one ETF follows the same index. How do you tell which one is better? One important factor is expenses.

Take two ETFs designed to track the S&P 500. SPDR S&P 500 Index ETF (SPY) has an expense ratio of 0.09% as does its lesser known rival, the iShares S&P 500 Index ETF (IVV). SPY, the original ETF, is more widely held than IVV. In fact, SPY is bigger than any other ETF in the world having…

The Next Contagion

The next contagion is beginning to spread around the globe.

It is unexpected on Wall Street, misunderstood in Washington — and very dangerous.

It could sabotage the plans of the U.S. Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and many of their counterparts overseas.

It is …

The Collapse of Sovereign
Government Bonds

This is certainly not the first financial contagion of recent memory:

Back in 1997, we witnessed a currency contagion —hatched in Thailand, spreading quickly to the rest of Southeast Asia … smacking Russia…

The Emotional Investor: There’s No Crying in Investments

Investing can be complicated.  Not only do you have to worry about price fluctuations and bid-ask spreads, you’re also concerned about whether to buy, when to buy and when to sell.   At the same time, investing is more than  strategic analysis and trading mechanics.  After all, investors are still human and emotions creep into our investment decisions far too often.

Investors are not computers. We are human beings with families, mortgages, career pressures and a host of other emotional baggage that affects our decisions.  We are subject to the  confusing whims of the market.  The distress of plummeting prices, the thrill of soaring…

Market Update: Bank of America (NYSE:BAC), Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO), MasterCard (NYSE:MA), Monster Worldwide (NYSE:MWW)

The end of a Federal Reserve program that helped unlock credit markets is spurring sales of asset- backed bonds with relative yields five times wider than on debt secured by car loans. The expiration of the Fed’s Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility is driving companies to sell bonds tied to loans that would otherwise require higher yields. The bonds offer investors higher relative yields because the collateral is considered riskier. Ally Bank’s sale of AAA debt backed by floorplans may yield 1.75 percentage points more than swap rates, compared with a spread of 0.35 percentage point for top-rated auto-loan bonds,…

More Evidence C-Wave Down Has Begun

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Get Energized With Energy ETFs

Energy is big business here in Texas. Just about everyone in the state knows someone in the industry, if they aren’t employed in it themselves.

In fact, energy is big business everywhere!

Crude oil, natural gas, gasoline — our civilization can’t live without them. So it’s no surprise that energy exchange traded funds (ETFs) are also big business.

Today I’m going to give you a brief overview of the ETFs in this sector. As you’ll see, energy is a surprisingly diverse industry.

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