Jon Strebler's Blog

There are a number of ways to (try to) identify the end of a bull market. It's usually easy only in retrospect; in real time, it's often pretty hard to do. The great Dow Theorists – Charles Dow, William Hamilton...

Last week brought new all-time highs in the three major U.S. stock averages (Dow Industrials, Transports, and S&P 500) nearly every day, continuing the remarkable winning streak that began a bit more than 4 weeks ago and shown below.

So far this has been the year of close, but no cigar. A couple of times earlier this year I was just a hair away from thinking this long Bull market was over, with a new Bear market in the wings.

I don’t know about you, but I’m just fascinated by this whole Ukraine situation. It seems like things get worse and worse there day by day, week by week, and that we’re constantly on the verge of things blowing up, going totally out of control.

“Pick your poison.” That little saying refers to, well — you figure it out. But here I’m going to relate it to market analysis, where the two main schools of thought are fundamental and technical. The fundamental people look at developments in the economy, federal spending, interest rates...

It’s not clear who was the first to suggest that a good definition of insanity is “To do the same thing over and over and expect different results,” but that definition has a certain ring of truth. Albert Einstein is alleged to have...

How’s the economy doing? More than any other way, we measure that by what’s happening with real GDP, or Gross Domestic Product adjusted for inflation. GDP, in turn, is equal to C+I+G+(X-M), shorthand for spending by...

In the last 40 years, gold has gone through two great bull markets, with a miserable 20-year period of sideways-to-lower prices in between. As that frustrating 20-year period unfolded, gold’s many fans had no idea what lie ahead, what those 20 years would bring.

Last week was a bad one for gold, along with silver and the mining shares. I’d like to say that this only means their upward potential is now even greater, but that kind of logic only applies in the very long-term.