Investment Strategies | The Daily Capitalist

Why I Covered My Shorts Today

No, this has nothing to do with the scandal du jour.

This is about the various hedging short positions I had put on recently.

I covered all four of them today. One short was on the general market, one was on oil service companies, and two were on big banking companies. All trades made money. [...]

Silver Is Probably Overpriced

DoctoRx wrote this piece before this morning’s silver flash crash.

Silver prices are quite vulnerable right now.

Despite being almost 30% off their recent high, they are slightly more than double their price of one year ago, which in turn was nicely up from one year before that. When I last did a [...]

Too Much Complacency in the Stock Market

I picked up two vibes today during the midst of the stock market downtrend that made me add to my short positions and, with more firepower, add to my Treasury holdings

Here we were past midday, down over 1.5% on the Dow and SPY, with clear global deceleration in economic activity, a highly valued stock [...]

Rolling Down The Yield Curve: A Play In Zeroes

DoctoRx makes a compelling case for zero coupon bonds.

Your humble and chronically bemused blogger drank the Kool-Aid today and added a substantial amount of a specific type of bond to his IRA holdings, transforming zero-yielding cash into a zero-coupon Treasury bond of 8 years duration. This was done while continuing to hold [...]

Exited, Pursued by a Bear

We may be on the verge of learning more about how much capital has been wasted by the malinvestments of the past decade. I believe that the single most important stock group is the financial group. It is the financials that reflect whether the “marks” that are assigned to assets are accurate, and if they [...]

Which Performed Best Over The Past 15 Years: Zeros/Munis Or Stocks?

Evidence of How Difficult It Is to Garner Excess Returns in the Stock Market

In January 1995, the Republicans took over Congress for the first time in, almost, forever. Quickly a form of gridlock took place that helped the stock market levitate. The R’s wouldn’t let President Clinton spend, and he wouldn’t let them cut [...]

Must Have Stock Sectors In A Declining Economy

Why begin a post on stocks by mentioning that I purchased a 5 year ‘A’ quality muni bond today yielding 4%?

Perhaps because I feel the risk-reward is better for this than for the stuff I’ve been buying lately in my stock accounts. And I hasten to add that in my retirement I am far [...]

Permanent Gold Backwardation: The Crack Up Boom

Professor Antal Fekete has written several pieces discussing gold backwardation, and arguing that this is the red alert signal for the coming financial Armageddon, when the tower of unpayable debts collapses. In this paper, I delve deeper into this topic. My goal is to make this topic approachable by the layman and describe what I [...]

Changing on a Paradigm

Last summer, I embarked upon a series of three posts explaining why I was committing our funds substantially into a weak dollar set of investments; click for links to the first, second and third of the series, which delineated three ways to invest on that theme: gold, silver, and foreign currencies. I also wrote favorably [...]

Why The Swedish Kroner Is A Good Investment Alternative To The Dollar

It’s bad enough when they shrink the size of my non-butter substitute from 16 to 15 ounces. It’s worse when my parents’ sour cream index soars 50% or so in price in less than 8 months.

But when they shrink the width of a roll of toilet paper, they’ve gone too far. Talk [...]

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Lote the Stock Market

There’s no typo in the title. “Lote” is a combination of love and hate. Here’s a precis of why that’s my current attitude toward the stock market.

By the ‘stock market’, I mean operating companies as opposed to funds of various sorts, preferred stocks, and other securities that would not qualify for consideration for entry [...]