McClellan Financial Publications, IncPosted May 27, 2019May 23, 2019The Baltic Dry Index (BDI) measures shipping rates on a type of cargo ship which hauls “dry” cargo, such as iron ore, coal, etc. as opposed to tankers hauling oil, or container ships hauling big steel boxes of stuff. The BDI has long been considered as an important leading economic indicator, because if steel companies...Read More
McClellan Financial Publications, IncPosted Aug 4, 2019August 1, 2019Quietness is a sign of trader complacency, and thus of a topping condition for prices.Quietness manifests itself in a variety of ways, and can be measured also in a bunch of different ways.Most often, chartists will use Average True Range (ATR) to look at what prices are doing.This week’s chart was featured in a recent issu...Read More
McClellan Financial Publications, IncPosted Sep 2, 2019August 30, 2019We currently have trade wars, presidential tweets, inversions in the yield curve, slowing earnings growth, decreasing corporate share buy-backs, and all manner of other problems affecting the stock market.And yet the long-term message from crude oil prices says that the stock market ought to continue trending upward into 2021.It...Read More
McClellan Financial Publications, IncPosted Sep 15, 2019September 12, 2019President Trump has been articulating his wish on Twitter and elsewhere that the U.S. have interest rates as low as other countries.That’s an understandable wish, as no one likes to pay more than the other guy is paying for something.In economics there are often unintended side effects, and that is what this week&rsquo...Read More
McClellan Financial Publications, IncPosted Sep 24, 2019September 19, 2019Back on August 22, I wrote here about how the spread between the 10-year T-Note yield and the 3-month T-Bill yield gives us a leading indication that is relevant for small cap relative performance.This time, I look at the "yield curve" in a different way, via the spread between 10-year and 2-year yields.The 10-year to 3-mont...Read More
McClellan Financial Publications, IncPosted Oct 22, 2019October 17, 2019Short-term interest rates have been falling, pushing the Federal Reserve to cut its own Fed Funds rate target.This week’s chart says that there is still a lot further for rates to fall. I get a lot of data out of the CFTC’s weekly Commitment of Traders (COT) Report, and I review the relevant insights every Friday i...Read More
McClellan Financial Publications, IncPosted Dec 18, 2019December 13, 2019Food prices are poised to see their biggest rise in several years, and not just because China is going to become a buyer again of U.S. agricultural goods.There is a different reason for expecting food prices to rise, and it is contained in this week’s lead chart. Gold prices act as a leading indication for lots of diffe...Read More
McClellan Financial Publications, IncPosted Dec 31, 2019December 27, 2019Gold prices are seeing a Christmas week pop, getting all of the gold bugs excited again.But the smart money “commercial” traders of gold futures have a different vision of the future. Every Friday, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) publishes its Commitment of Traders (COT) Report, detailing the numbe...Read More
And just like that, it never happened!The S&P 500 just broke to a new record high...Continue...Read More
McClellan Financial Publications, IncPosted Jan 9, 2020January 3, 2020The efforts of the Federal Reserve to inject extra liquidity into the banking system over the past 2 months have helped to fuel the year-end (2019) rally.Questions remain about how long the Fed may choose to keep up that effort, and whether the Fed has enough ink in the printing presses to overcome other market forces. And with...Read More
McClellan Financial Publications, IncPosted Jan 15, 2020January 9, 2020The major averages are ignoring missile strikes, oil market turmoil, and excessively bullish sentiment, keeping prices marching higher in 2020.But we have a major bearish divergence now in the VIX Index, which is NOT making lower lows to confirm those higher price highs.The VIX Index made its lowest closing low for this price u...Read More
McClellan Financial Publications, IncPosted Feb 6, 2020January 31, 2020The primary driver of stock prices is supposedly earnings, right?So how is it that earnings as a percentage of GDP have been falling since a peak in late 2014, and yet the major averages like the DJIA and SP500 are up 60% since then?This week’s chart looks at some data which is buried deep within the Bureau of Economic An...Read More
Abby was scheduleded to give the keynote speech at a conference at Georgia Southern Univeristy. She discovered that in order to speak publicly at a Georgia college she had to sign a pledge of allegiance not to Continue...Read More
McClellan Financial Publications, IncPosted Feb 24, 2020Febuary 20, 2020We had an inverted yield curve in 2019, and yet the planet did not tumble off its axis.The sky did not fall.So does that mean an inverted yield curve is not really a problem?In a word, NO!What the casual armchair economists do not realize about the yield curve is that the effects on the economy of changes in yields are delayed...Read More
McClellan Financial Publications, IncPosted Mar 4, 2020Febuary 28, 2020The Federal Reserve decided in September 2019 that it would start to insert itself into the market for “repurchase agreements”, or repos.The reasons why the Fed honchos decided that they needed to do that will be an interesting subject for future historians.For current market historians, the important point about th...Read More
McClellan Financial Publications, IncPosted Apr 6, 2020Apr 2, 2020The past 3 weeks have seen a huge surge in the bearish percentage among the investment advisors and newsletter writers in the Investors Intelligence survey.Often these data are shown as the spread between the bulls and the bears, but for this week I thought it would be informative to look at just the bears alone.And to better correl...Read More
Alasdair Macleod, has a background as a stockbroker, banker and economist, heightens his warning of an impending collapse of the existing dollar-centric fiat currency system.Alasdair Macleod is head of research for GoldMoney. He also runs FinanceAndEconomics.org, a website dedicated to sound money and demystifying finance and economics. He has a background as a stockbroker, banker and economist. Read More
Axel Merk, President and CIO of Merk Investments, talks about OUNZ, a paper gold ETF, that allows investors to take possession of physical gold.Axel Merk is the Founder, President, Portfolio Manager, and CIO at Merk Investments LLC. He is an expert on qualitative research and macroeconomic trends. Mr. Merk is also an expert on macro trends, hard money, international investing, and on building sust...Read More
Axel Merk, provides analysis of various markets and how to best prepare for survival and hopefully prosper in the midst of this impending economic depression.Axel Merk is the Founder, President, Portfolio Manager, and CIO at Merk Investments LLC. He is an expert on qualitative research and macroeconomic trends. Mr. Merk is also an expert on macro trends, hard money, international investing, and on...Read More
McClellan Financial Publications, IncPosted May 31, 2020May 28, 2020The officially stated rate of U.S. unemployment in April 2020 was 14.7%, the highest since the Great Depression, when the data were not as rigorously tabulated compared to these days. Regardless of whether the 14.7% number is exactly correct (it isn’t), it is still a high number. And May’s number may be higher still wh...Read More