How FOMO Rules the Market

FOMO MOFO FOMO – the Fear of Missing Out – seems to be really in play for the stock market these days. I’d say it’s an oversimplification, and maybe a little mean-spirited to chalk FOMO up to jealousy.  Of course, we sometimes suffer pangs of envy when we see something that another person has that […]

Chart of the Week: Cocoa Prices Go Nuts

Chart of the Week: Cocoa Prices Go Nuts You had better stock up on chocolate.  Due to flooding and blight in West Africa where most cocoa beans are grown, the price has gone parabolic. Companies that process raw cocoa can’t afford to buy the beans.  Companies like Hershey (HSY) have seen their share price drop […]

Bombs Hit Oil Refineries

Bombs Hit Oil Refineries About a week ago Ukraine sent 35 drones to attract Russian oil and electricity infrastructure.  Reuters estimated that the attacks halted 7% of Russian refining capacity. According to Business Insider, about 600,000 barrels of Russia’s daily oil-refining capacity had been affected by Ukrainian drone strikes. JPMorgan Chase & Co estimated that […]

Cities Are Dead

Cities Are Dead Fred Cordova CEO of a real estate consultancy based out of Santa Monica recently declared that a third of all office buildings will have to be torn down.  He said in Fortune Magazine: “There will be a bifurcation…The product in a good location with a good, safe environment will recover. And then […]

CEO Wars!

Steelmaker Cleveland Cliffs’ (NYSE: CLF) CEO Lourenco Goncalves just ripped his counterpart at U.S. Steel (NYSE: X) a new one, saying “These types of people need to go.” Here’s the background: Back on December 18, 2023, Nippon Steel won the bidding war for U.S. Steel (NYSE: X). The fourth-largest steel company in the world’s $55 […]

A Small Bet on the #2 Horse

Engineering marvels tend to be small. Microscopic nanotech robots, sub-atomic qubits for quantum computing, transistors so small you can put 15 billion of them on an iPhone chip, and that chip so small it actually fits in an iPhone… But one of most advanced engineering feats of engineering is massive:  That machine weighs 330,000 pounds. […]

Shocking Elon Musk Speech

Shocking Elon Musk speech I caught a transcript of an Elon Musk speech from March 1, 2024, and it shocked me. Musk said,  “I’ve never seen any technology advance faster than this. The chip shortage may be behind us, but AI and EVs are expanding at such a rapacious rate that the world will face […]

COVID Market

Four years ago today, a Friday, I was speeding out of Baltimore, on my way to New Orleans. My daughter was a junior at Tulane University. Along with the rest of the world, it was shutting down because of COVID. Students had till Sunday to abandon ship. I did the math and even with cat […]

Do You Buy or Sell?

Novo Nordisk Launches on Weight Loss Pill.  Novo Nordisk’s stock is hitting new record highs after it announced its latest weight loss drug.    The stock has been on fire.  Novo is now Europe’s biggest stock by market capitalization having gained more than 80% over the last 52 weeks. You see, Novo Nordisk has developed […]

This Fintech Stock is a Winner

Brazilian online bank PagSeguro (NASDAQ: PAGS) looks like a winner.  Banks are typically the most sound way to invest in emerging economies. It’s a pretty basic formula: as GDP rises and more people join the middle class, all aspects of banking will rise too – deposit accounts, lending, credit cards, payment processing, etc. As emerging […]

Nvidia Insiders Sell!

The headline sounds pretty scary: “Tech Stocks See Biggest Outflow On Record…” Bank of America goes on to say that over the last week, tech saw the “largest outflow ever.” Sounds bad, right? Well, investors sold a net $4.4 billion worth of tech stocks. That’s a fairly big number. But in context? After rising another […]

Mystery Market

The Third Productivity Revolution Very few people predicted how this market was going to shape up.  A year ago the argument was between a hard and a soft landing with most pundits falling into the ranks of the hard.  They were all wrong and I’ll tell you why. But first a little background, when COVID […]