Joseph Calhoun

TANSTAAFL is an acronym for "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch". It has been around a long time - Rudyard Kipling used it in an essay in 1891 - but it was popularized by...

Something very important happened last week. No, it had nothing to do with the stock market, at least not directly. There was a lot of volatility in stocks last week but in the end,...

Stagflation. It's a word that strikes fear in the hearts of investors, one that evokes memories - for some of us - of bell bottoms, disco, and Jimmy Carter's American malaise. The...

Remember, your goal in investing isn't to earn average returns; you want to do better than average. Thus your thinking has to be better than that of others - both more powerful and...

Well, that didn't last long. I wrote last week about the inversion of the 10-year/2-year term spread as the yield of the 2-year Treasury note rose above the yield of the 10-year...

The yield curve inverted last week. Well, the part everyone watches, the 10-year/2-year Treasury yield spread, inverted, closing the week a solid 7 basis points in the negative. The...

There's an old Wall Street maxim that the cure for high commodity prices is high commodity prices. As prices rise, two things will generally limit the scope of the increase. Demand...

Why did stocks sell off in recent months? Was it the emergence of the Omicron variant? That was a popular narrative right after Thanksgiving but that lasted less than a month before...

I don't know the answer to the question posed in the title. No one does because the future is not predictable. I don't know what will happen in Ukraine. I don't know how much what...

Last week when I wrote this weekly piece, the S&P 500 futures were down 80 points as Russia appeared poised to attack Ukraine, which they ultimately did last week. Today I sit here...

As I write this, the S&P 500 futures are down over 80 points, apparently in response to some rather harsh comments from Vladimir Putin concerning Ukraine. Russia recognized the...

There were some wild, unprecedented - frankly stunning - swings in some very large, high-profile stocks last week. The press concentrated on Meta, nee Facebook, and Amazon as the yin...

I'll just get this out of the way right at the beginning. The question in the title of this post refers to the end of the ongoing stock market correction and the answer is likely no....

Fear tends to manifest itself much more quickly than greed, so volatile markets tend to be on the downside. In up markets, volatility tends to gradually decline. - Philip Roth Be...

What is the consensus about the economy today? Will 2022 growth be better or worse than 2021? Actually, that probably isn't the right question because the economy slowed...

In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule. Friedrich Nietzsche The new year got off to quite a bang last week. It was almost as if...