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The Final Breaths of the Dying Stock Market Rally
The stock market High of 2000 was a repeat of the stock market high of 1929, except that in the scale of things it was one degree larger. It has been said that “History doesn’t repeat; it chimes.” If so, then the sound that was heard in the crash which followed 1929 was that of a small child’s drum, while the sound that we will soon hear will be that of a mallet pounding on the largest drum in the orchestra.
Perhaps this analogy can help in understanding the differences in scale. Imagine that it is October 1929. A boy is…
29Sep2009 | William Kurtz | 0 comments | ContinuedRearranging the Deck Chairs on the Titanic
The Candlestick price bar in the NASDAQ Composite on Thursday was double-barreled bearish, in that it was a combination of two patterns in one – the “Doji” and the “Hanging Man.” A “Doji” occurs when the opening price and the closing price are the same, or nearly so. A “Hanging Man” occurs at the top of a long advance in prices when the range of prices between the open and the close is very small, and that range is near the top of the total range of prices of the period. The “Hanging Man” requires a lower closing in the…
17Aug2009 | William Kurtz | 0 comments | ContinuedBearish Engulfing Candlestick Pattern May Signal End of the Rally
The eminent Philosopher-General of the Baseball Diamond, Yogi Berra, has been quoted often as saying that “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.” That caution applies well to the stock market and to its accompanying stock Indexes. It’s not possible to count the number of times that our Candle charting work gave us reason to believe that a price trend in the stock market had run its course – only to be fooled again.
It’s no different this time. We have been patiently waiting for a credible Candle chart signal that the Great Rally of 2009, which began on March 6, has…
6Aug2009 | William Kurtz | 0 comments | ContinuedTarget: Net Fuel Cost of Zero
This little treatise was prompted, in the beginning, by recurrent published stories having to do with the airlines’ difficulties in coping with extraordinarily high, and “volatile,” jet fuel costs. Even so, it applies with equal force to users of Heating Oil aand Diesel fuel, which of course also are refined products derived from Crude Oil, and which are somewhat similar to jet fuel, which itself is most akin to kerosene. User groups other than airlines would include railroads, trucking companies, garbage collection companies whether public or private, school districts which operate school bus fleets, taxicab fleets, bus lines, courier services…
31Jul2009 | William Kurtz | 1 comment | ContinuedLife Insurance Companies and Bankrupt Shopping Center Developers: Chapter 2 Begins
I’ve written several times in the recent past about the involvement of life insurance companies in shopping center financing. Whereas there has been great attention paid in the press to the difficulties of the automobile companies, of the banks, and of AIG, not much has been said about the exposure of many life insurance companies to the adverse conditions of the credit and commercial real estate markets. That may be the case because, in the public’s mind, and in that of financial reporters, the connection between life insurance companies and the real estate industry is not immediately obvious. Yet, the…
18Apr2009 | William Kurtz | 0 comments | ContinuedBeware the Candlestick “Hanging Man” in Wells Fargo Shares
Wells Fargo shares sailed up 31.7% last Friday on the strength of unexpectedly good profit numbers, which were ascribed principally to strong business in new mortgages. Other banking issues basked in the reflected glory and gained ground as well.
Upon brief examination of the performance of the Dow Industrials on Friday, one factor fairly leaps off the charts: whereas banking issues did well, by and large the shares of companies which make tangible products which people use every day barely moved – for example, Johnson & Johnson, Kraft, Procter & Gamble, Exxon Mobil, and Coca-Cola. Johnson & Johnson and Merck were actually down a…
13Apr2009 | William Kurtz | 0 comments | Continued“What a Revoltin’ Development This Is!” – Jimmy Durante
That was a favorite quote of Jimmy’s, from his early days in television. Later on, there was the “Jimmy Durante and Garry Moore Show,†in which every performance was graced by a tongue-twister byplay between Jimmy and Garry, which Jimmy always lost when he tried to say “This is the self-same spot where sad old Scott got shot†three times in a row without making a mistake.
And now we learn that even the life insurance companies are in the self-same spot where sad old Scott got shot. What a revoltin’ development this is.
Frankly, I’ve been waiting for this shoe to drop.…
9Apr2009 | William Kurtz | 0 comments | ContinuedCandlesticks Trounce North Korea’s Rocket Science
The Dingdong 2 rocket (a/k/a The Fizzler) is said in some quarters to have placed a satellite in orbit, and that it is broadcasting patriotic music. There are several difficulties with that thesis: responsible authority states that (1) the rocket, together with its satellite payload, never achieved orbit; (2) various pieces thereof were tracked as they fell into salt water; (3) no tracker has been able to find the satellite in any orbit; and, most importantly, no one can hear the music except, perhaps, Kim Jong-Il himself.
The Japanese Candlesticks routinely perform better than that. As a particular point of…
7Apr2009 | William Kurtz | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Nose Knows
Over a period of centuries as the English monarchy became less and less absolute, the English system of jurisprudence developed firm notions of personal liberty, equity, the right to confront one’s accusers, the presumption of innocence, and the right to trial by a jury of one’s peers.
Those sure principles were transported to the Colonies intact, or nearly so, and were exalted first in the Declaration of Independence, then in the Articles of Confederation, and then, particularly, in the first ten Amendments to the Constitution. One marvels at the sparseness of the writing. The authors understood the impossibility of covering every…
1Apr2009 | William Kurtz | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Wrong Choice for a Mandated Firing
The President has just made a very bad mistake in demanding the resignation of Rick Wagoner as Chairman and CEO of General Motors as a condition of further Federal funding.
Mr. Wagoner has spent most or all of a working lifetime at GM. He probably knows all of the nooks and crannies of the company better than anyone alive. He was handed a plate of union contracts hatched decades ago by other top management – contracts not tied to increases in productivity, which have left the company in a very poor defensive position. The Japanese automobile industry was effectively born in…
30Mar2009 | William Kurtz | 0 comments | Continued
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