What’s wrong with South Africa?

The study of emerging markets is a useful exercise in examining our assumptions about economies and markets because they sometimes operate by different rules than developed economies. As an example, Bloomberg reported today that the markets are freaking out over the firing of the finance minister: South African markets were thrown into turmoil after President Jacob...

2016: Time to get bearish and go “Zero Hedge”?

Trend Model signal summary Trend Model signal: Neutral Trading model: Bullish The Trend Model is an asset allocation model which applies trend following principles based on the inputs of global stock and commodity price. In essence, it seeks to answer the question, "Is the trend in the global economy expansion (bullish) or contraction (bearish)?" My inner...

A surprise from rotational analysis

One of my tools in my market analysis toolbox is leadership analysis. In particular, I found that in bull phases, it pays to buy the market leaders (see Momentum + Bull market = Chocolate + Peanut butter). I was playing around with Relative Rotation Graphs, or RRG, the other day and what I found was a surprise....

Demographics and gold: Something doesn’t add up

This is another in a series of occasional posts on quantitative analysis. I am indebted to Josh Brown for pointing me to an article by Larry Swedroe, which discusses a study on demographics and real interest rates. While I found that I can derive significant insights from single variable studies like these, the world is...