Watch the financial news, search the Internet, read the financial press and the most common theme coming from those who are supposedly “in the know” is that the US stock market is ahead of itself. And while those same talking heads are longer term bullish most are waiting for pullbacks to put new money to work. In other...
Barrick Gold Corp (TSX:ABX) has suffered the same consequences as many of its counterparts in the mining sector. To blame the most recent drop in gold would be misguided. While Barrick suffered a 33% drop in a little under a week on the heels of the gold sell off, the fact is that the downtrend was already well in place. One...
The last 2 months have been nothing short of a roller-coaster ride for Canadian investors. For most of 2013, the resource stocks have been struggling while the bank stocks were a glimpse of hope. That was short lived as February rolled in as a new round of selling started pressuring the darling Canadian banks. We have now seen...
Last Tuesday at approximately 1:00 pm EST, a Tweet from the Associated Press (AP) Twitter account read as follows; “Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured.” Within a space of three minutes, US $136.5 billion of the S&P 500 index’s value was wiped out. The S&P 500 index fell...
Over the past 30 years, globalization has made the world a much smaller place. Supported by advances in technology and communications, corporations have sought markets outside their domestic borders. As a middle class takes root in emerging economies, those markets become increasingly important to the bottom line of global...
Listen to the US media and you might think your portfolio has underperformed, with US stocks making record highs with a 12.14% year to date return for the iShares S&P 500 index ETF (TMX: XSP). Note this ETF is hedged to the Canadian dollar, which added about 3 percentage points to the year-to-date return. Unfortunately,...
On February 28th, 2013 we wrote a blog discussing if Royal Bank was worth investing in. To read the blog, click here: http://optionmatters.ca/blog/2013/03/01/royal-opportunity/ Our focus was to find an interesting way for investors to play Royal Bank. At that time in February, these were the facts: Royal Bank was trading at...
Is there a particular option strategy that works all the time? The answer of course is no just as it is with stock picking or asset allocation metrics. Despite that many investors focus entirely on option writing strategies. The logic seems sound given the potential cash flow and the fact that most options expire worthless....