Yesterday, the Labor Department reported that nonfarm payrolls (jobs) increased by 162,000 in March — the largest increase in three years. Today’s chart puts that decline into perspective by comparing job losses following the beginning of the current economic recession (solid red line) to that of the last recession (dashed gold line) and the average recession from 1950-1999 (dashed blue line).

For six long years, we’ve had declining real values in stocks. Since the 2002 bottom, we’ve had rising values in nominal terms. This is the same set-up that we saw in the early ’70s except for one thing: it’s bigger

As stocks have become increasingly invulnerable over the last few weeks high beta assets have gone thru the roof.  The discrepancy between small caps and large caps has been particularly [ … ]

The Dow continues to make new rally highs. To provide some perspective to the current Dow rally that began just over one year ago, all major market rallies of the last 110 years are plotted on today’s chart.

This chart needs little to no explanation.  The SPY has now finished higher in 14  consecutive days.  You literally can’t lose in this market: Cullen RocheMr. Roche is the Founder [ … ]

There was very little change this week in the S&P 500’s commitment of traders report.   Small speculators reduced their short positions marginally, but remain heavily net short.  As a contrarian [ … ]