It does not seem too long ago that I was the only person who though VXX was worth mentioning. Known formally as the iPath S&P 500 VIX Short-Term Futures ETN, VXX was launched three years ago today, alongside of its sibling, the iPath S&P 500 V…

It does not seem too long ago that I was the only person who though VXX was worth mentioning. Known formally as the iPath S&P 500 VIX Short-Term Futures ETN, VXX was launched three years ago today, alongside of its sibling, the iPath S&P 500 V…

Stocks opened sharply lower to start the week. The drop was driven by issues bubbling up out of Europe once again. While these European issues came up early Monday morning, a master target had been achieved late last week in the markets. This level was $133.30 on the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (NYSEARCA:SPY) and had [...]

Most of the leading retail stocks are coming under early selling pressure. The Market Vectors Retail ETF (NYSEARCA:RTH) is trading lower by $1.31 to $116.25 a share. This tells us that the majority of leading retail stocks are declining at the start of the day. Traders can watch for intra-day support around the $115.50, and [...]

This morning, the U.S. Dollar Index futures (DX H2) are trading higher to start the day. As we should all know by now, when the dollar starts off strong the major stock indexes will usually be weak. That is certainly the case this morning as the major stock indexes come under early selling pressure. Very [...]

The commercial real estate sector has been on fire since October 4, 2011. At that time, the iShares Dow Jones Real Estate ETF (NYSE:IYT) traded as low as $46.70 a share. Last week, the important IYR closed at $60.78 which is a new six month high. This rally has been nothing short of sensational for [...]

I may have been away on vacation for the last two weeks, but that doesn’t mean my brain was entirely at rest. In fact I was particularly busy in the January 2012 edition of Expiring Monthly: The Option Traders Journal, which was published last week …

We are going to revisit our model for personal income distribution, PID. It was first formalized in 2003 and used income distributions through 2001. We had to convert all reports published by the Census Bureau in pdf format between 1947 and 1993 into e…

Paul Krugman has presented a graph with real GDP for the UK. It illustrates that the current crisis is worse than it was in 1929. I’ve also downloaded data from the Maddison historical data and the Conference Board total economic database, which has …

We have been following inflation in Japan since 2005 when our first paper on the Japanese economy was published. We have revisited inflation in Japan in 2010 and confirmed the predictions of deflation as expressed by the negative GDP deflator. In thi…