Investing Megatrends
The optimistic view that inflation in the US is peaking took a hit on 13 October with the release of a bullet-laden September CPI (consumer prices inflation) report. The bullets – a 0.4% increase over August and year over year inflation at 8.2% –support the counter-argument view held by many that the interest rate hikes…
The end of coal-fired power is in sight
If future historians pick a point in time when Australia comprehensively turned its back on coal-fired generation, they may well point to AGL’s decision to bring forward the closure of Loy Yang A, the cheapest (excluding emission costs) power generator in the energy market spanning eastern Australia. AGL announced on September 29 that Loy Yang…
Gold stocks V shaped bounce
Though still battered, the gold stocks are starting to stage a comeback. They just screamed higher out of fundamentally-absurd stock-panic levels in a violent V-bounce! That big surge fueled by gold’s parallel one is already starting to shift sentiment away from excessive bearishness. The gold stocks more than doubled soon after the last time they…
False Gold-Stock Panic
The left-for-dead gold miners’ stocks are literally trading at stock-panic levels today! But they’ve been slammed to extreme lows in recent months on a false premise. Traders assume gold’s parallel plunge must be fundamentally-righteous. But that was driven by enormous gold-futures selling on anomalous market events. As these unsustainable extremes inevitably reverse hard, the battered…
Lessons Learned from Lithium
“Past performance is no guarantee of future results.” It seems in the blink of an eye newcomers to share market investing will come across this omni-present cautionary adage on the perils of investing in equities. The puzzling contradiction in this advice is readily evident in what these newcomers find dominating the data presented on financial…
52 Week Highs in the Eye of the Storm
The Australian Stock Exchange has managed to escape a plunge into official Bear Market Territory but there are some market experts of the opinion it is only a matter of time before we follow the lead of US markets into the abyss. All major US exchanges are in Bear Market territory and still falling. In…
Defence Stocks with Double Tailwinds
The US Federal Reserve continues to hike interest rates, dancing around the delicate line between curbing demand enough to tame inflation while steering clear of curbing demand too much, plunging the US and with it much of the developed world into a recession. As expected, the US Fed hiked interest rates another 0.75%, with an…
The energy crisis is likely to last years
An overreliance on vanishing Russian fossil fuels will torment Europe. Europe is restarting mothballed coal-based power plants because the benchmark electricity price has exceeded 1,000% above its average of the past decade (where prices are set by the marginal cost of the last unit – essentially, the most expensive unit – of energy purchased to…
Will Rising Interest Rates Help or Hurt the Big Four Banks
For many economic forecasters, market experts, and professional and retail investors, the wait is over. The “other shoe” has dropped. Markets came down with a severe case of the jitters when it became obvious rising inflation around the world would not ease without central bank intervention with rising interest rates. The interest rates in question…
Gold languishing but its upside remains
Gold continues to languish near major lows after a rough summer, deeply out of favor with traders. Oddly this leading alternative investment seems oblivious to the first inflation super-spike since the 1970s. That should be driving big gold demand, fueling a major upleg. But that classic inflationary response has been temporarily delayed by heavy-to-extreme gold-futures…
