Sears Holdings Corporation (SHLD), the parent of Kmart and Sears, Roebuck and Co., is the leading home appliance retailer in North America and is a retail sales leader in tools, lawn and garden, home electronics, and automotive repair and maintenance. Key proprietary brands include Kenmore, Craftsman and DieHard, and a broad apparel offering, including such…
Walmart (NYSE:WMT) is down over 30% year to date as many investors seem to have thrown in the towel since the company announced poor guidance for the next few years last month. However when a large cap (doing almost $500 billion in sales every year) loses 30% off its share price in a short space of time, I…
Each month one or two high-profile government reports show the US is growing, adding jobs and generally recovering from the Great Recession. But it’s not clear how that can be, when the part of the economy that makes and moves real things keeps shrinking. Here’s a chart, published recently by Zero Hedge, showing that US manufacturing has…
Stocks were in selling mode today, as the markets gave back last weeks Thanksgiving holiday rally. As you will note, the SP 500 failed to strike a higher high in this rally, setting it up for a rollover retracement. As of the close today I have taken off the longs in volatility and the shorts…
The Chart of the Day belongs to Erie Indemnity (NASDAQ:ERIE). I found the insurance brokerage stock by using Barchart to sort the Russell 3000 Indexstocks first for the highest number of new highs in the last 20 trading sessions, then I used the Flipchart feature to review the charts. Since the Trend Spotter signaled a buy on 10/7 the stock…
Many people think that they ring a bell at the top of a bull market. Ding-a-ling-a-ling. That is indeed often the case. The bell was rung in 2000 at the top of the dot-com bubble — I like to think it was 3Com spinning off Palm that broke its back. But sometimes there is no…
Following a good strategy is important, but it isn’t enough to win. You need tactics too. Tactics are the small concrete steps that move you along the path to success. Weak tacticians lack the specific moves required to implement a strategy and never reach their goals. When I sit down to play a game of…
Is the U.S. economy on solid footing? Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen seems to think so. In particular, Yellen expressed confidence in household spending as well as job growth during prepared testimony before Congress on Thursday. It is not surprising to see central bank authorities describe current economic circumstances in glowing terms. Later this month,…
The European Central Bank surprised and disappointed the market today, as President Mario Draghi announced a QE extension program and deposit rate cut of 0.10%. Neither measure was as wide or deep as many analysts had been led to expect based upon the President’s own comments of a few weeks ago, when he stated that…
Photo Credit: Mike Mozart Barnes and Noble, the largest retail bookseller in the US, will be reporting 2Q2016 earnings today after the market closes. Expectations are bleak, as analysts are confident the company will suffer a year over year decline in EPS and revenue. Since the e-book phenomena, Barnes and Noble has been struggling to keep…
