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The stock market ditched Wall Street years ago. The masters of the universe, like the Giants and Jets, now scrimmage across the Hudson River in New Jersey—their trading these days done almost entirely by computers piping algorithmic playbooks into a fortress of servers in Mahwah and other competing exchanges nearby. The small squads of human traders who remain on the floor at 11 Wall St., the New York Stock Exchange’s Teddy Roosevelt–era headquarters, are (for the most part) just playing fantasy football. Yet just as the Big Apple’s football teams kept their New York names after wedding themselves to the...

Hat’s off to my friend, co-host and boss, Chris Faulkner. This past Monday, the Dallas Business Journal announced their 2014 Who’s Who in Energy list. Under the Oil and Gas tab, it read the following: James L. Poston, Aruba PetroleumT. Boone Pickens, BP Capital Chris Faulkner, Breitling Energy I have to admit, I was pretty proud when I read that Monday afternoon. I’ve been working with Chris on radio programs since December of 2013, and immediately I became aware of his incredibly sharp, witty and fast-thinking mind. These days, he and I may do up to 7 hours of oil...

Hat’s off to my friend, co-host and boss, Chris Faulkner. This past Monday, the Dallas Business Journal announced their 2014 Who’s Who in Energy list. Under the Oil and Gas tab, it read the following: James L. Poston, Aruba PetroleumT. Boone Pickens, BP Capital Chris Faulkner, Breitling Energy I have to admit, I was pretty proud when I read that Monday afternoon. I’ve been working with Chris on radio programs since December of 2013, and immediately I became aware of his incredibly sharp, witty and fast-thinking mind. These days, he and I may do up to 7 hours of oil...

Investment & Finance End of 2014 Q3 into Q4 Thread Edition Comodities Stock Indexes    now   3 Mo. Chg.   Annualized return     now   3 Mo. Chg.   Annualized return  gold $1,220.26 -7.2% -25.9% S&P500 1,982.85 1.2% 4.7% silver $17.71 -16.2% -50.7% DJIA 17,113.15 1.7% 7.0% oil $512.66 -6.2% -22.6% NASDAQ 4,512.19 2.4% 9.8% U.S. $ $85.62 6.7% 29.8% Rus2k 1,119.33 -6.2% -22.5%  Here's what happened with the third quarter investments:  Looks like the dollar soared (so much for Fed printer devaluations), metals tanked (so much for safe havens), and while big cap. stocks have done best this past quarter the current...

In the fairy tale "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," Ali Baba, a poor woodcutter, is in the forest when he hears a group of robbers approaching on horseback. Afraid, he climbs a tree and hears one of the men say, "open sesame." A door opens in a rock and the men go in, the door shutting behind them when another says, "close sesame." When they leave, Ali Baba climbs down and approaches the rock. He says, "open sesame" and it opens for him. Inside he discovers jewels and gold, which he takes, becoming rich himself. Jack Ma is the...

Investment & Finance Week in Review (Thread -Sept. 21 edition)Prices finally picked a direction and went for it  --topping a super week w/ metals collapsing, an FOMC meeting, Scottish Vote not to do anything, new IRS rules, stocks leaping, and the Alibaba IPO hype,  --and in the lull before the end of Q3 and beginning a new earnings season.  One thing at a time; metals finally broke in to newer lower levels as support folded,    ...and stock traders made up their minds deciding to respect the 50-day moving average support and rebound prices into what IBD calls "market in...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I got people... People who know that I am a tech aficionado are asking me, "Rush, what's Alibaba, and do I need to be concerned about it?" Alibaba is the Chinese, the ChiCom Amazon, and it is going through its IPO today. It just became the world's largest Internet business and close to the world's largest business, period. It's gonna end up being even bigger than Walmart today. Jack Ma, you can see him. Drudge features a couple of pictures of Jack Ma. He founded Alibaba on the front page of the Drudge Report, Yahoo owns 23%...

On the eve of the vote for Scottish independence, Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch explained that the election is merely a symptom of an ”anti-establishment groundswell” sweeping through the Western world. On Friday Murdoch spoke about the impending vote with Fox News’s Neil Cavuto. “I think there’s meaning in this, and I think it goes beyond Scotland,” he said via phone. “There’s a great anti-establishment groundswell which is seen in this vote in Scotland. You’re seeing it here in Britain in the anti-European party, whose one single issue is to get out of Europe. And I think you’re seeing it...

Capital Market Update; Investment & Finance Thread (Sept. 14 edition) In a phrase it looks like everything's beginning to bust loose for stocks, metals, bonds --something here for everyone!   Stocks chalked up another distribution day last Friday as the S&P nudges toward the famous 10-week moving aveage that serves as a floor in the good times and a ceiling in the bad.  Traders are also noticing that over the past week or two up volume was slight while down volume was strong.  Like maybe some kind of consensus or something, at least for the short term.  Remember however...

Day before yesterday we were checking out this BEA map of the U.S. that was colored/labled by GDP and it got us on to the redstate/bluestate divide.   Naturally (as expected) small gov't low tax policies generally flowed with growing economies but what snagged us were the anomalies --Alaska did so poorly yet West Virginia soared.   Seems we can overcome that by ourselves and get all the state numbers for GDP from the BEA along w/ employment states by state from the BLS --and then toss them into online mapping websites (I used iMapBuilder Online). Got to just love this info...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)In an exclusive interview Wednesday with Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren slammed former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor for accepting a multimillion-dollar job with a Wall Street investment bank shortly after leaving Congress. "This is wrong," Warren said in regard to Cantor's new role as vice chairman and managing director at Moelis & Co. "People work in Washington and, man, they hit that revolving door with a speed that would blind you." She went on to claim that banks hire politicians like Cantor "not because they bring great expertise and insight, but because they’re selling...

Late Monday night it was reported that former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor would take a job at investment bank Moelis.The news has already prompted the predictable eye-rolling about the "revolving door." And to the Tea Partiers who ousted Cantor in a primary earlier this year, the news that he is going to Wall Street is vindication that he was never a populist like them.But anyway, Moelis has put in a filing with the SEC, detailing his pay package (Via Erik Schatzker).From the filing:Group LP has agreed to pay Mr. Cantor an annual base salary of $400,000. Group LP has...

This morning looking in today's Real Clear MarketsGet I got a real kick out of this link that appeared :  Kick Off Labor Day Weekend With Some Depressing Charts - Quartz.   What the Quartz guys were wetting their pants over was how employee pay % total Gross Domestic Income was falling.  Here's a plot of the numbers they stole from the American Tax Payer supported BEA.gov: (Note: Freepers can't post Quartz articles because of an alleged copyright complaint)      Apparently what's really got them upset is that the evil capitalist is exploiting the American Worker and the the share for evil...

Interesting. Tried to short Burger King (BKW) which is doing a buyout of a company and shot up at one point around 19% (which is nuts). No shares available to short. That must mean the big boys have shorted all they can and know what is going to happen next.

The debate over the pending crash in the stock market seems endless. Whether or not margin debt as reported by the NYSE has relevance any more is an interesting question in a world in which the retail investor has abandoned investing (decline in liquidity). The real marginal buyers are hedge funds and some banks while the cash buyers remain central banks. The make-up of the market has changed and the interest rates are well below even many dividends. So talking about total margin debt nearing $500 billion cannot be compared just on a nominal basis. Yes, we may yet see...

Happy weekend investors!!This week's thread will have to settle for a lame blog at the top due to a severe case of writer's block.  Topics considered were a weekly recap but here's the week in stocks and here's the week in metals.  Another idea was chat about the Fed meeting at Jackson Hole but they're just wrapping it up and the Fed website isn't quite updated.  Another idea is a resume of all the good news & bad news about today's econ condx, but that either keeps changing or it's already been rehashed on these threads by better brains than...

Wall Street banks could desert Britain if the country decides to leave the European Union, senior figures in the industry have reportedly said. Some major institutions are believed to be already drawing up plans to move activities abroad amid concerns that the UK is drifting further away from the EU. Most US and Asian banks currently run their main European operations from the UK, which gives them a passport to provide services across the EU. But if the UK left the European Union, it is believed to be unlikely foreign banks based in London would carry on receiving the same...

Alternate Title:  UPTREND SPECIAL EDITION!   That's right, last Thursday IBD announced that NASDAQ had its "follow-through-day"  so investors in the driver's seat just saw the light turn green.  That said, we also know that nobody walks across a one-way street without looking both ways, and even though the signs say 'buy' here's what they've been saying so far this year-- --and this is the problem we got driving down the road while only being able to look out the back window.Remember these market designations are not arbitrary, they're signals proven with decades of research.   That said, we're still looking at a...

No matter how you look at it this is truly an amazing world we live in if everyone has more information than any time in recorded history and the only thing that's for sure is (like Sam Goldwyn said): "nobody knows nothing!"  What we got is that 2014 started out great for gold and the blahs for stocks, then the other way around w/ stocks powering up, and now we're back w/ metals out-shining stocks again.   In fact, right now the Russell 2000 (favoring small stocks) even shows the infamous 'death cross' w/ the 50 day moving average punching down...

Yo!   What we got this past week is the economy's officially in terrific shape and both stocks and metals are tanking.  Now, while it's never good to be too convinced about what we think is going to happen next in the future, I personally am having a hard time trying to decide what I think is happening right now.  Somehow the more I know about what's going on the less I know about what's going on.Oh yeah, IBD says stocks are still in an 'up-trend'.   This is the thread where folks swap ideas on savings and investment --here's a...