Sep 8, 2015

The Wall Street Journal reports that new home construction still has not made it back to 1990s levels, let alone the mid 2000s. Reports on new home construction show stability but the carnival days of big subdivisions on cheap land 50 miles away from downtown with no down payment,  are a thing of the past....

Sep 4, 2015

China's stock market may have another 50% leg down according to major traders and chartists. China now buys about an eighth of the world’s oil, a quarter of its gold, almost a third of its cotton and up to half of all the major base metals. The fear that China’s appetite for commodities, from copper to coal, is...

Sep 3, 2015

Sam Stovall of S & P Capital IQ points out while many investors may think the worst is over, September September is the only month in history in which the S&P 500 fell more frequently than it rose. What's more, in the 11 times that the S&P 500 fell by more than 5 percent in August, it declined in 80 percent of...

Sep 2, 2015

Here come the machines...the speed at which robots are gaining in sophistication is moving at the pace of Moore's Law. Fortune Magazine's Geoff Colvin's new book, Humans Are Underrated reveals that robots are capable of recognizing emotion and giving it back. Strange deflationary things are happening in the economy. The...

Sep 1, 2015

A stock buyback, also known as a "share repurchase", is the act of a company buying back its own shares from the marketplace. On the positive side, you can think of a buyback as a company investing in itself, or using its cash to buy its own shares. But as Barron's columnist Ben Levisohn says  “Like the Wizard of Oz,...