Tuesday, April 22, 2025
I’ve seen two hour waits at some of the best spots near me. Full restaurants don’t sound bearish, yet, you likely also keep seeing bearish news (like the recent First Republic Bank collapse). What’s going on? I looked at the recent earnings report for Dominos… the pizza company. Pizza orders gives you a great glimpse […]
Last week’s earnings reports from a few different REITs indicated that commercial office space and commercial lending have not fallen into the crisis the financial media has warned of. The fear in the markets is that low office space occupancy will lead to declining property values and commercial mortgage defaults. Also, since commercial mortgages are […]
While options block trades can potentially provide insight into what the smart money is doing, it’s impossible to know for sure what the goal of a big trade is. For instance, a 22,000-lot call spread expiring in October appears to have been purchased in iShares 20+ Treasury Bond ETF (TLT) options. This would seem to […]
Not long ago, I sat down with Jay Soloff, who runs several outstanding options income and trading services at Investors Alley. We had a long discussion about what is going on in the markets in general and banks, specifically. I talked at length with Jay about what has happened in the banking industry since early […]
Last week I was a speaker at the MoneyShow in Las Vegas. Besides speaking, I like to network with a wide range of investment professionals. I was intrigued by one idea concerning preferred stocks from the discussions: that they will allow investors to benefit from the Fed’s interest rate increases. Preferred stock shares can be […]
Cheryl Pate is one of the managers of the Angel Oak Financial Strategies Income Term Trust (FINS), one of the closed-end funds we own in my Underground Income Service. Normally we would not share this information with everyone, but after giving paid members a first look, we decided her message was too important not to […]
The Dollar Index (DXY) just hit a 1-year low almost to the day. Last April, we saw the DXY almost breaking below 101 as it is right now. It’s interesting… As the Dollar moves up and down… it’s almost perfectly correlated to how stocks move. When the Dollar dropped 10%+ this year, stocks have rallied […]
Options block trades can be interesting tools to gauge market expectations, even if you don’t know exactly what the purpose of the trade is. For instance, a big put spread traded last week in iShares US Real Estate ETF (IYR). The trade occurred on the same day that lower housing prices were reported across the […]
The pandemic certainly turned the semiconductor industry on its head. Despite record production of semiconductors, shortages everywhere led to months-long waiting lists for many consumer products. To meet consumer demand, semiconductor makers ramped up supply even more. But then inflation arrived and decided to stay awhile. Central banks responded by raising rates, and economies slowed. […]
In these uncertain times for investors, energy midstream stocks offer an island of stability. This sector provides an attractive combination of current yield and dividend growth. However, midstream companies divide into two distinct categories, and the differences are important. Energy midstream covers the movement and storage of energy commodities from the upstream drillers to the […]
