There’s no shortage of noise flying around the markets today. But for me, there’s nothing more dangerous than noise. What I want and need is a very clear signal. That’s exactly what came across my desk last Thursday with this “bargain idea.”

Yesterday, I walked you through the most important letter in finance: F. The letter F starts the term “Five Spot,” slang for a $5 bill. It also starts the word “Franklins,” slang for $100 bills. But yesterday’s article covered the F-score, a mathematical calculation that tells you how strong a company’s balance sheet is based on nine calculations. Today, I…

A high-profile hedge fund manager is warning that an “enormous” bubble in technology stocks has popped. He believes the top was registered on Sept. 2, 2020, that investor sentiment has shifted from “greed” to “complacency,” and that bear-market pain for technology stocks is ahead. Is he right? Possibly, yes. The reasons he cites for calling a tech-stocks top will be…

Supply chains are a marvel of modern commerce. The links of a supply chain can span tens of thousands of miles, traversing whole continents and crisscrossing the globe. Supply chains are also fragile and vulnerable to disruption. Under adverse circumstances, a supply chain can easily get backlogged or broken. The lack of a part from a single factory, or the…

Today, we’re starting a fantastic journey together.  Our Chief Research Officer, Justice Clark Litle, has some very big plans for Decoder.  He’s committed to taking our products at TradeSmith to a whole new level.  And that means that Justice will no longer be writing TradeSmith Daily.  Don’t worry. Justice isn’t going anywhere.  He’s still out in the desert, bringing you…

Republicans and Democrats finally got their act together and came to agreement on a $900 billion stimulus effort for struggling Americans and small businesses. Congress is rushing to finalize the bill alongside a last-minute effort to fund the U.S. government for the remainder of the fiscal year. There were compromises galore, and many were disappointed with various aspects of the…

A 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…

Many Americans are looking forward to traveling for the holidays to see family and friends, after lockdowns and COVID-19 waves hindered their plans last year. But the airline industry is facing a new problem. The current labor shortage could create another set of challenges for an industry in need of recovery.

The stock market is both timeless and ever-changing, which makes it a curious paradox. On the one hand, markets look, feel, and behave exactly the same today as they did 100 years ago, or even two millennia ago. We can read stories of a bull market mania or market panic from the early 1900s, or the 17th and 18th centuries,…

This morning, Alibaba (BABA) reported earnings before the bell. If you haven’t been following the Chinese technology stock, it has faced an incredible amount of pressure. Today, I want to discuss recent events at the ninth-largest company by market capitalization trading on the U.S. stock market.