Posts by Karen Smith

As an active trader/investor, I spend many hours each day conducting my due diligence on the markets. This involves reading many articles/opinion pieces about the factors influencing the direction of the broader markets as well as my individual equities. I love when I come across information that furthers my understanding of why markets move the…

How many times have we heard the long-standing trading adage, “Don’t fight the Fed!” when discussing portfolio positioning in the stock market? When studying equity markets across time, one notices that the market heads to higher valuations when our Federal Reserve is in a process of reducing interest rates or keeping them low on a…

It should surprise no one when I confidently make the statement that someday the great bull market of the past six years will come to an end. The question we all want to know is – when? While I do not have a crystal ball providing that answer, I can clearly see that 2015 is…

Have you ever experienced sitting in front of your trading computer, ready to pull the trigger on a well-researched trade, only to find that you simply can’t push the button? Let’s face it, we are emotional beings – and there is definitely an emotional component to trading and investing that can be just as challenging…

For several years now, we have heard pundits and prognosticators go on and on about the risks of strong – even perhaps runaway – inflation as a result of too much easy monetary policy for too long. Five years into the great experiment of zero interest rate policy, we still show headline inflation numbers to…

As the S&P 500 continues to defy gravity and head to all-time highs, investors are facing a bit of a dilemma. The “greed” monster on one shoulder wants to stay long the market and continue to benefit from potentially higher equity prices despite the fact that this index has not had a 10% correction in…

I like to compare equity markets to a swinging pendulum. When a force is exerted upon a pendulum, it begins to swing back and forth. Each continued swing becomes less and less significant until the pendulum finally comes to a resting point in the center. We have cycles in equity markets much like the swings…