If you haven’t bought Bitcoin for the first time yet, the odds are good that you will. The question is whether you will do it sooner — and be glad that you did — or do it later and wish you had acted much earlier. Bitcoin is not just an investment opportunity, like a stock that investors can own or choose not to own. It is the future of money, and the ultimate store of value, in a world where
Read nowOn Aug. 10, TradeSmith Daily explained two terms every investor should know: Financial Repression and Fiscal Dominance. To briefly summarize them, financial repression is when a central bank deliberately keeps interest rates low — ideally below the rate of inflation — to inflate away the value of debt. This is a means of coping when a nation’s debt load becomes too large. Fiscal dominance, which often goes hand in hand with financial repression, is the term that describes what happens
Read nowOn Tuesday, Oct. 6, President Donald Trump did something mystifying. He tanked the stock market — and created a sense of panic among millions of unemployed Americans and struggling small-business owners — with a single tweet. Here is how Brian Kilmeade, the Fox News co-host of Fox and Friends, described it: “For the president to come out with a tweet like that, with the markets still open, just crashed the market and cost people a lot of money.” For markets,
Read nowWhen news of the president’s COVID-19 diagnosis hit, in the wee hours of Friday morning, overnight markets reacted with shock and fear. By the end of the day on Friday, though, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 had mostly recovered, with small caps (via the Russell 2000 index) even turning positive on the day. In Monday’s premarket session, meanwhile, the major indexes were green, if only slightly. This might seem strange, given the level of uncertainty the country
Read nowThe president and the first lady of the United States have tested positive for COVID-19. This is earth-shaking news on multiple fronts. The U.S. now faces a national security crisis. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), eight out of 10 COVID-related fatalities in the U.S. were in patients 65 years or older. President Trump is 74 years old, clinically obese, and is a self-described insomniac, sleeping only four hours per night. These factors put the president
Read nowYou may remember Theranos, the blood-testing startup run by Elizabeth Holmes. Theranos was a fraud, but the company reached a multi-billion-dollar valuation by suckering some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. Theranos had an “all-star” board of directors that was almost cartoonish in its weight and stature. At various points along the way, the Theranos board included two former U.S. Secretaries of Defense; a former U.S. Secretary of State; two former U.S. senators; a former
Read nowA U.S. Senate battle royale over who gets to fill a U.S. Supreme Court seat is bearish for markets. That is a key reason why bearish feeling has intensified this week, with asset prices dropping across the board. The cause-and-effect mechanism here is not direct, but indirect. It has to do with fiscal support. The real U.S. economy – meaning Main Street rather than Wall Street – is still in danger of collapse due to ongoing pandemic fallout. In the
Read nowThe Bank of International Settlements, or BIS for short, is known as the central bank for other central banks. In January 2020, the BIS published a new research paper — not its first one — on central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Eight months ago, the BIS found that 80% of all the central banks they surveyed were investigating CBDCs, and 40% had moved from the research stage to the concept and design stage. Meanwhile the U.S. Federal Reserve and European
Read nowOver the past two weeks or so, the British pound has seen a sharp decline against all major currency pairs. For the month of September 2020, thus far, the pound is down notably against the dollar, the euro, the yen, and the Swiss franc. Relative to the euro, the British pound is the weakest it has been in years. If the move accelerates, the U.K. will have reason to worry. Unfortunately, this could easily happen, as the phrase back on
Read nowOn Sept. 2 we explained why Tesla is not only a bubble, but likely a hyper-bubble. We also explained why, even with four quarters of consecutive profit on the books, Tesla was not likely to make it into the S&P 500 — even though bulls considered that a sure thing. As it turns out, our Sept. 2 piece was one day removed from the all-time high. And on Sept. 4, just 48 hours later, the S&P 500 announced three new
Read nowFor a guy who just turned 90 — his birthday was Aug. 30 — Warren Buffett is still razor sharp. He is certainly not “washed up,” as flash-in-the-pan day trader Dave Portnoy called him earlier this year. Every once in a while, Buffett makes a surprise investment with billions. It is typically an unexpected move — the kind of thing that wouldn’t have occurred to Wall Street, but seems smart, possibly even brilliant, the closer one looks at it. The
Read nowAfter 92 years, Exxon Mobil was ejected from the Dow Jones Industrial Average — along with two other names — as S&P Dow Jones Indices announced on Aug. 24 the biggest shake-up to the Dow’s line-up in years. Exxon, in various forms, had been a part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average since 1928. But not any longer. As a battered and tattered energy stock, Exxon had to go. As of April 2020, the entire U.S. energy sector — the
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