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There is a lot going on in the US housing market. Excessive monetary stimulus keeping mortgage rates low, historically low inventory available for sale, and FOMO (fear of missing out … on rapidly rising home prices). The Case-Shiller repeat sales index for October is out … and the national home price index “slowed” to 19.08% YoY as mortgage rates rose. Note that available inventory of homes for sales remains very low. By metro area, Phoenix AZ once again leads with 32.3% YoY. Minneapolis MN is the slowest growing metro area in terms of home prices at 11.5% (tied with Chicago,...

The stock market is overvalued, and it's not just the tech sector that appears stretched, according to JPMorgan's chief global market strategist Marko Kolanovic.The S&P 500's forward price-to-earnings ratio is currently 19.4x, and when you back out tech and AI stocks, the remaining 65% of the index trades at 17.4x, according to Kolanovic. That's not cheap, as the historical forward P/E of the index is 15.3x, meaning that current valuations represent a 10% premium. "FOMO is in full swing, there is complacency being built into stocks with VIX at the lows of its range," Kolanovic said in a Monday note....

New data from online real estate brokerage Redfin further illustrates how wild the Austin housing market has been in 2021. Redfin says more than 1,500 homes have sold for more than $100,000 above asking price since the beginning of 2021 in Austin, and 72 of them sold for more than $300,000 over the asking price. At this time last year, only 22 homes had winning bids over $100,000 over the asking price. The year-over-year gap is even wider for homes that sold in a range of $25,000-$99,999 over the asking price. Last year, from Jan. 1, 2020 to May 23,...

There is no way this bull market doesn’t end very badly. We all know that is the reality of this liquidity-fueled market, but we keep investing for “Fear Of Missing Out.”An excellent example of investor exuberance came recently in “Investors Go All In:”“More importantly, over the past 5-MONTHS, more money has poured into the equity markets than in the last 12-YEARS combined.”If that chart alone doesn’t get your “Spidey senses” tingling, I am not sure what will. However, I have a few more charts to share with you.Technical DeviationsIn the short term, fundamentals don’t matter. Such is because over a...

The more bizarre, the better, apparently -- a fashion collab between KFC and Crocs is a rousing success ... KFC says its fried chicken-scented shoes are already sold out!!! Someone had the bright idea to pair the famous foam clog company with the fried chicken icon to make limited-edition kicks -- and they flew off (virtual) shelves Tuesday, selling out in less than 90 minutes. The bucket clogs went for $60 a pair, with $3 from each sale going toward the KFC Foundation's employee scholarship fund. The Crocs look like a bucket of the Colonel's original and -- most shockingly...