ChristopherCarrollSmith

ChristopherCarrollSmith

The South Korean show Squid Game dramatizes, in part, the extremely high household debt levels in that country. With household debt-to-GDP highest in the world, South Korean 30-somethings owe an average of 270% of their annual income. Those are the kinds of household debt levels that could either plunge the country into recession as credit tightens or cause...

ChristopherCarrollSmith Updated 

Fridays and Mondays are the most important trading days of the week. A lot of traders will rebalance their portfolios at the beginning or end of the week, and then simply hold through the week. These days also signal something about the news environment. A down Friday typically signals that traders fear bad news over the weekend, and a down Monday signals that bad...

ChristopherCarrollSmith Updated 

Boeing has had five straight quarters of negative-- and steadily worsening-- free cash flow per share. Current FCF per share over the last 12 months: -$34.15. Book value is also negative at $-31.04 per share. Frankly, you're buying liabilities when you buy this stock. Boeing's share price has risen despite one disaster after another. The latest is that a bunch of...

ChristopherCarrollSmith

Bond funds like the SPDR Portfolio Mortgage Backed Bond ETF (SPMB) often look like money-losers when you view their returns on a non-adjusted basis. In this case, the price is down about -0.74% over the life of the fund. The picture looks very different when you adjust for dividends. For SPMB, the return changes to +46.09% over the life of the fund: That's...

ChristopherCarrollSmith Updated 

Ethereum is getting an upgrade known as EIP 1559, which goes into effect August 4. www.reuters.com The upgrade does three things: 1) It increases block size 2) It stabilizes miner fees 3) It burns a portion of each miner fee to limit supply The upgrade is widely expected to make Ethereum-based DeFi more attractive to investors. I'm thinking $2750 - 2850 is a...

ChristopherCarrollSmith Updated 

The headline: vaccinated people are getting and spreading Delta This afternoon the CDC announced that a Delta variant outbreak in Massachusetts infected a lot of vaccinated people. The vaccines provided protection against death and hospitalization, but less-than-expected protection against infection and transmission. The disturbing data helps me make sense of...

ChristopherCarrollSmith Updated 

My largest single position right now is La-Z-Boy, and the consolidating price action the last few days is telling me the time may be right. Deep Value La-Z-Boy offers a 2.1% forward dividend yield and currently trades at about 10 forward P/E, .74 forward P/S, and a fantastic 5.6 P/FCF. The low price multiples on this wonderful cash cow are well below the...

ChristopherCarrollSmith Updated 

Diversifying your strategy There are lots of ways to "win" at investing. For diversification, it can be useful to bet on a lot of different strategies, because often when one strategy starts to go wrong, another will start to go right. But unless you're an expert coder with a lot of free time, you probably can't actively manage multiple different strategies...

ChristopherCarrollSmith Updated 

Gold has jumped above its exponential moving averages on both the daily and weekly charts after inflation numbers came in red-hot yesterday and today. Despite the hot inflation numbers, Federal Reserve chairman Jay Powell signaled this morning that the Fed will stay the course on easy monetary policy and still expects inflation to be temporary. That means that...

ChristopherCarrollSmith Updated 

Since 2005, the IWM/SPY ratio has held this key support level 6 times. This support failed only once, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. Now we find out whether the pandemic was the exception that proves the rule, or whether the pandemic structurally changed something about the relationship between small caps and large caps. Small cap valuations look better...

ChristopherCarrollSmith

The Study I ran an analysis on monthly stock-market returns over the last 20 years or so, to determine which sector delivered the best median dividend-adjusted returns in each month. December 2020 was the last month included in the study. The sector funds included in the analysis were all equal-weighted, although they don't all use identical methodologies or...

ChristopherCarrollSmith Updated 

Fundamentals My trading algorithm doubled down on KB Home today due to a substantial increase in Wall Street consensus earnings forecasts. I estimate that forward P/E on the stock is about 5, and forward P/S is about 0.6. (But note that my forecasts are more optimistic than the Street consensus, which currently puts forward P/E at 6.7.) I estimate that KBH will...

ChristopherCarrollSmith Updated 

After a long period of underperformance related to the Chinese government's crackdown on Jack Ma, Alibaba finally got an upside breakout from its triangle this morning. Alibaba has had some recent analyst upgrades (although its Equity Starmine Summary Score is only up to 2.2/10 from its previous score of 0.9/10. It has also had some positive buzz. A couple of...

ChristopherCarrollSmith Updated 

A Bullish Trend Line Cross Medifast has just completed a bullish upward move across a resistance trend line. I've purchased a July 16 call option and also bought some shares. I'm hoping it will move up as decisively as it recently moved down, hitting $290 by early July. For confirmation, look for a candle close above the trend line today. If price closes the...

ChristopherCarrollSmith

Recently we've seen a significant "rotation" in markets toward large cap tech and defensives, and away from small caps, financials, and transportation. In this post, I will describe the rotation through a series of charts, and I will also suggest some explanations for what's going on. The long and short of it is that I think we've just witnessed a regime change,...

ChristopherCarrollSmith Updated 

Polygon is considered the leading Ethereum scaling solution and has been a fast mover and a popular pick for investors. I am using a scaled entry strategy on Polygon. I call it the crypto Martingale. In this strategy, you choose several supports and buy at each one, tripling your position size each time. It requires a little math in advance in order to make sure...

ChristopherCarrollSmith Updated 

Liquidity is the whole ballgame As I've watched the market rip higher amid massive federal deficits, extremely low taxes, and extremely low interest rates over the last several years, I've experienced a growing conviction that "liquidity is the whole ballgame" where markets are concerned. You can chart stock market performance largely as a function of how...

ChristopherCarrollSmith Updated 

A New Product Shows Ford Is Finally Taking Electric Seriously Ford just announced the release of its Lightning all-electric F150, due 2022. Available at essentially the same price point ($39,974) that Tesla has advertised for its Cybertruck, due late 2021. A Ford rep dropped this little bomb on Tesla's triangle-shaped Cybertruck in a media interview: “Our...