Urban Carmel's Contributions

In September 2014, the cumulative advance-decline (A/D) line for the S&P hit a new high. A month later, the stock index was down 10%. Twice in December 2014 and again in February 2015, the cumulative A/D line...

First quarter GDP growth was stronger than originally estimated. When adjusted for seasonality, the economy grew 1.8%, which is consistent with the average growth rate over the past three years. It is also consistent with...

Last week, the number of investment advisors who are bullish US equities dropped below 50%. For many, this was seen as sign of bearishness. Indeed, relative to the past 16 months, investment advisors were relatively bearish...

Jeff Gundlach is the new Bond King. Last year, when the consensus overwhelmingly expected US 10 year yields to rise over 3%, he said they would instead fall under 2%. In the event, they fell to 1.65%.

Retail sales bears are at risk of making the same mistake that railroad volume bulls made in 2014. In 2014, the bullish view was that railroad volume was surging. This supported bulls' views that overall economic activity...

A year ago, we started a recurring monthly review of all the main economic data. For most of that time, the consensus view has been that growth in wages and employment would soon accelerate and that this would lead to...

GDP growth in the first quarter was, by various measures, among the best since the end of the recession. Real GDP grew 3.0%, the second highest growth rate in the past 5 years. GDP excluding inventories grew 2.5%...

Inflation has been decelerating in recent months and remains well below 2%. With oil prices collapsing, CPI dropped to -0.1% in February. Consensus expectations are that inflation will accelerate but it hasn't happened...

The US indices have been struggling to produce gains for the past four months. In fact, the S&P is lower today than it was before Thanksgiving. There are any number of reasons for this pattern but the one that is currently most often referred to is falling...

The S&P rose 30% in 2013. In 2014, it was up just over 10%. Since the start of the "best six months of the year for equities" in November (nearly 5 months ago), the index is up 4%. Any number of factors could account for...

Question: What do the following have in common: falling inflation, soaring bond prices, disastrous corporate earnings, plunging retail sales and "the worst U.S. macro relative to expectations since 2009"?

Attention is gravitating to the Dollar, and for good reason. In the past year, the Dollar index is up 25%. Since 1980, the Dollar has only risen that quickly in one year once before: the period leading to February 1985.

With valuations at high levels, the current pace of sales growth is likely to be the limiting factor for equity appreciation. This is important, as the consensus expects earnings to grow at 3% in 2015 and 13% in 2016.

Even casual observers of the equity markets know that there is always a multitude of risks which threaten the advance of stock prices. It takes little effort to identify these. Focusing on the correct risk is trickier part.

Every week, Birinyi Associates tracks nearly 30 financial bloggers and classifies their views as being either bullish on the market, bearish or neutral. The results are published on Mondays at their Ticker Sense website.

Every month, we review the latest BAML survey of global fund managers. Among the various ways of measuring investor sentiment, this is one of the better ones as the results reflect how managers are allocated in...

It's conventional wisdom that new highs in indices should be confirmed by an expansion in breadth. In other words, you want to see the number of stocks trading above their moving averages expand as the index price moves higher.

In May we started a recurring monthly review of all the main economic data. At the time, the consensus view was that growth in wages and employment were accelerating and that this would soon lead to a meaningful...