Pull the trigger with confidence.

News on tariff exemptions for certain tech companies helped lift the Nasdaq 100 Index (NDX) to a new all-time high on Aug. 7, 2025.  That index is currently 11% above its own 100-day simple moving average, which is pretty far up there. 

But this is happening with only some of the component stocks pulling their weight.  Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia are doing fine, but this week's chart shows that a declining number of NDX component stocks are above their own 100-day MAs.  That number peaked... Read More

The NAAIM Exposure Index reached a high of 99.3 on July 2, and has been backing off since then even though the SP500 is going higher.  This condition has historically been a problem for the stock market.

NAAIM is the National Association of Active Investment Managers, made up of money managers who believe that they should not just buy and hold, but also to be in the market at the right times.  Each week they survey their members about their firms' average stock market exposure.  Answers can... Read More

I have been writing since 2009 about how the 2-year T-Note yield gives a great message about what the FOMC should do with its Fed Funds target.  It is gratifying to see how so many other analysts have now picked up on this topic.  Unfortunately, the FOMC has yet to do so, and the members and their 400 PhDs working at the Fed seem to think that they know better than the bond market.

Exactly how the 2-year yield seems to know ahead of time what the FOMC is going to (eventually) do is an... Read More

When the Fed first started doing "Quantitative Easing (QE)" in 2009, it was a new concept.  Nobody had ever seen the Fed do that before, so it was hard to know what the outcome was going to be.  We now have seen 4 different rounds of QE, and the conclusion is pretty obvious that doing QE boosts liquidity in the banking system, and it boosts the stock market.

Similarly, doing the opposite known as "Quantitative Tightening (QT)" takes away liquidity and hurts the stock market when the Fed has... Read More

Silver prices have been following gold's lead, pushing up to new all-time highs in 2025.  Silver's chart is a great picture of an uptrend, and you only want to fight an uptrend if you have a really good reason.  Some data from the latest COT Report might be that reason.

The Commitment of Traders (COT) Report is published every Friday by the CFTC.  It lists the quantities of futures contracts held by different groups of traders.  The latest COT Report had 332 different types of futures... Read More

The FOMC in June elected not to cut its interest rate target, even though inflation data are coming in lower than feared.  Their claim is that they don't know what the inflationary effects of tariffs are going to be.  We already have the lowest annual CPI inflation rate since Covid.  That’s the good news, but whether it is good enough to convince the Fed to cut at the July 29-30 meeting is a different question.

The FOMC members are likely unaware that there is a 5.31-year cycle operating in... Read More

The strong breadth since the April 8, 2025 tariff crash low has produced a new all-time high for the NYSE's daily A-D Line.  It has also taken the the Ratio-Adjusted Summation Index (RASI) up above the important +500 threshold.  These two conditions are almost always a recipe for uptrend continuation.  This time might be different.

Normally gobs of breadth is a really great thing for the stock market.  It is a sign that liquidity is plentiful, because if even the least deserving stocks can... Read More

Elon Musk is famously having a feud with President Trump this week, which is getting a lot of media attention.  As one of the salvos in this feud, Musk posted on X that, "The Trump tariffs will cause a recession in the second half of this year."

I agree with the forecast, although not necessarily the causation he sites.  If a recession was going to happen anyway, and if tariffs make it worse, then did the tariffs "cause" the recession?  That is a rhetorical question, for which there never... Read More