On the heels of our premortem of the stock market in 2015, let's take a look at the market turbulence we experienced last week and yesterday.
The short version? There’s nothing to worry about yet.
December 16, 2014
On the heels of our premortem of the stock market in 2015, let's take a look at the market turbulence we experienced last week and yesterday.
The short version? There’s nothing to worry about yet.
December 15, 2014
Following up on last week’s post about the value of premortems, I thought I’d do one on the stock market for the coming year. We’ll imagine that a decline has happened and try to figure out how and why, with the goal of strengthening our positioning today.
December 12, 2014
One of my favorite takeaways from Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow is the idea of the premortem—that is, looking at a new or proposed project, assuming it has failed, and projecting why that happened. (It's a more proactive version of the postmortem, where you look at actual failures and try to figure out what went wrong.)
December 11, 2014
As I wrote the other day, the U.S. stands to benefit considerably from cheap oil. The question now is who will suffer—and what might that mean for the U.S.?
December 10, 2014
I’m working on two things right now: my economic and market outlook for 2015, and an update on the international economic scene that I’ll present at Commonwealth’s top-producer conferences.
The problem I’m facing with both, I realize, is that the world has really changed in the past couple of years, and the recent past is no longer a good guide to the future.
December 9, 2014
The short answer to that question is no. There is some downside to falling oil prices. But I’d take a 90-percent upside with a 10-percent downside any day of the week.
December 8, 2014
Newspaper reporters (and bloggers!) are breathing a sigh of relief as the new Congress gets closer. Just as the economic worries are subsiding—at least here in the U.S.—political risks can move back to the front page. As someone who writes a blog post every day, all I can say is thank goodness.
As a citizen, though, I am somewhat (but not yet very) concerned.
December 8, 2014
On December 4, I joined John Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics, for an interview on Fox Business. The discussion centered on which global markets may be best for investing in 2015, and why I think the greatest risks to the stock markets will come in the first quarter.
December 5, 2014
There's been some trepidation recently about the November jobs report. Amid signs of weakness, pullbacks on various stats, and problems in the rest of the world, most forecasters were backing off on their earlier estimates, just in case.
They should have doubled down.
December 4, 2014
I recently took a look at housing for the first time in six months or so, and I thought it was time to examine the stock market in similar fashion to see where we are.
In my market commentaries and videos, I have continued to discuss the positive trends and healthy fundamentals—which are very real—but we also need to consider the broader context. The following three indicators paint a somewhat cautionary picture.
