Executive Summary In case you missed it, President Trump established the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE. Politics aside, something must be done about government spending. Currently our U.S. National debt is over $36.5 trillion dollars, while the annual budget deficit last year was $1.8 trillion. Studies [...]

Executive Summary Some of the things impacting the stock market currently include tariff implementation, negotiations over tariffs, DeepSeek, AI, earnings, ISM and PMI data releases along with the January jobs report. Each datapoint seems to initiate exaggerated market moves. Partly because markets are very overvalued, as illustrated [...]

Executive Summary Futures markets were in a tailspin early Monday due to Chinese AI tool called DeepSeek. Many investors have flocked to AI computing related companies, sending their shares soaring. As of this writing, AI company equities are tumbling as much as 17% on the day. Below [...]

Executive Summary Last week’s missive discussed the affordability of housing. Look at the first graph, one can see it requires a $115,000 household income to afford a median priced home. During the pandemic, the CARES Act provided relief to those struggling to pay their mortgage. Now with [...]

Executive Summary The median after-tax household income is about $70,000, while the median sales price of houses is $420,000. When including a 20% downpayment, estimated taxes and insurance of $6,400, a 30-year mortgage at 7% would come to a total payment of about $2,768 per month. This [...]

Executive Summary Overvaluation in the stock market has reached such extremes even a Federal Reserve Bank governor, Lisa Cook, uncharacteristically mentioned it in her quote included below. I have also included data below to give substance to the proclamation. Forward earnings per share projections are often overly [...]

Executive Summary There are many claiming the U.S. Economy is strong; however, in this issue I am going to point out some data discrepancies. FHN Financial published their GDP projection with no outlook for recession. The second graph below shows when the unemployment rate rises above the [...]

Executive Summary Current stock market valuations are pushing the limit of statistical norms. Look at the first graph below which shows the market is over four standard deviations from the mean. Normal statistical distributions fall within four standard deviations 99.9937% of the time! The second two graphs [...]

Executive Summary The following was written by Brian Wesbury, Chief Economist, and Robert Stein, Deputy Chief Economist, at First Trust Advisors, L.P. I thought it clarified much of the chatter surrounding the inflation argument. I hope you enjoy their take. Please proceed to read The Details below [...]

Executive Summary Benjamin Graham (Warren Buffett’s mentor) and David Dodd authored the book Security Analysis, in which they define investment as: “An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and an adequate return. Operations not meeting these requirements are speculative.” The second [...]