Michael Batnick

Fool You

“The main purpose of the stock market is to make fools of as meny men as possible.” -Bernard Baruch The other day I pointed out the unusual weakness out of small cap stocks. I also added the caveat that it was likely not indicative of anything, which is about as close to a prediction as…

The Last Straw

My first job out of college was with a life insurance  financial planning company in Manhattan. At first it was a pretty seductive, high energy environment. Unfortunately reality reared its ugly head pretty quickly thereafter. I couldn’t understand why life insurance was the right product for everybody, whether they were 30, 40, 50 or even…

Paralysis By Analysis

While many people have recently said it has never been a better time to be an investor, one can also make the case that it has never been as confusing. Between index funds and mutual funds, hedge funds and fund of hedge funds, ETFs and ETNs, financial advisors and robo advisors, there is an overwhelming…

Surviving The Short Term

Thinking and behaving for the long term is one of the most difficult challenges an investor is faced with. Although simply buying and holding has produced fabulous returns, this type of investing requires you to commit to several sizable drawdowns, likely to be over fifty percent in some cases, over the course of your investing career….

The Fool’s Gold

“Patterns are the fool’s gold of financial markets” Benoit Mandelbrot In 1976, a group of economists discovered that stocks tended to do well in January, small cap stocks in particular. Small cap stocks returned 26% in January of 1975 and an 18% in January of 1976, enough to get anybody’s attention.  This came to be…

Are We Due For A Recession?

That depends on what you mean by “due.” Are we due in the sense that it has been a while since the last recession? Sure. Since 1926, recessions have happened on average every 59 months. We’re currently 80 months removed from the last recession. Are we due in the sense that stocks have gone too…

Admissions of Uncertainty

“It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously”- Daniel Kahneman Apple is the biggest and one of the most carefully watched stocks in the world. It’s 50-day average volume is 49,069,563 shares, or roughly $4.8 billion a day. The buyer and the seller of every one of those shares believes they are receiving a…

Teddy Roosevelt Versus Jay Gould

I want to share an amazing piece of history that I found in the New York Times archive from 1882. It pertains to Teddy Roosevelt, who in addition to being the youngest President of the United States, was also the youngest New York assemblyman. In one of Roosevelt’s first acts as an assemblyman, he would…

A View From The Bottom

We’ve seen some explosive moves since the S&P 500 bottomed on January 20th. 241 S&P 500 stocks are up double digits, 29 stocks are up more than 20%, and 8 stocks are up more than 50%. Below is a further dissection of recent S&P 500 performance from the bottom. Here are the returns of the…

Calling It Versus Nailing It, Redux

The only thing gold miners and biotech stocks have in common is their extreme performance over the past few years. While miners lost 76% of their value between 2011 and 2015, biotechs gained 241%. Below you’ll see the 31-week rate of change of gold miners versus biotechs, which has spent most of the last few…