Commodity Investing Contrarian Indicator: California Teachers Fund “Goes Long”

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Contrarian indicators don’t get much better than this. Our good friend here in town, fellow Austrian economist fanatic Jonathan Lederer sent along word today that the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS), has approved a plan to begin investing in commodities “as a hedge against inflation and to buffer losses in equities” (Seriously, I’m not making this […]

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Stocks just wrapped up their worst month since February 2009 – the last full month of the last leg down of the 08-09 stock market crash.  So how are investors feeling? Not great – but all things considered, not too bad either. The Wall Street Journal (one of our favorite contrarian indicators) is running a […]

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The big financial news today is that Germany is taking steps to ban naked short selling. This was the “reason” stocks and the Euro were down today – at least according to the financial media. Which got me thinking – governments usually enact these types of bans in times of desperation.  At least that was […]

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At least in the near term, investors may be wise to be a little wary of gold. Reason #71: Abu Dhabi has opened a gold bar vending machine!  From Bloomberg: Abu Dhabi’s Emirates Palace hotel opened a vending machine that dispenses gold bars, making the United Arab Emirates the first country outside Germany to install […]

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Spent part of my weekend reading Bob Prechter’s latest newsletter, which is always thought provoking.  The folks on his team were kind enough to allow us to republish this article from the April issue of Bob’s Elliott Wave Theorist. In terms of technical and sentiment analysis, I think Prechter is second to none.  He’s been […]

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Flipping through the Wall Street Journal Online, there’s not much love for Europe or the Euro right now, as headlines read: EU Worries Push Stocks Lower Europe Contagion Infects Global Markets Turmoil Helps Push Euro to a 14-Month Low (For some further fun reading on being a WSJ contrarian, check out our fun piece on […]

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The Chicago Board Options Exchange publishes a daily report detailing open put vs. call option positions of traders.  Since this represents bets made on stock prices rising vs. falling in the near future, it’s an interesting gauge of sentiment. Today I pulled this data since 2004 from the CBOE’s website, and plotted the 200-day simple […]

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I thought it’d be fun to peruse the Wall Street Journal to see if we could glean some insights into current investor sentiment. Mainstream business publications are famous for (unintentionally) signaling tops and bottoms in markets – but is this really the case, or more of an old wives tale than truth? I couldn’t think […]

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