Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
“Push button. Get Mortgage.” That’s the tagline of Quicken Loans’ new product, Rocket Mortgage. The company introduced Rocket Mortgage to the massive television audience watching Super Bowl 50 in a one-minute commercial. The ad describes a simple push button app that allows people to get mortgages on their phones, which would lead to a “tidal…
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. Having slogged through several years of research on the many and complex causes of the financial crisis, I take it personally when people try to rewrite history and ignore what actually drove the events that led to the collapse. That is our charge today, in response…
Predictions about financial markets are, almost without exception, notoriously wrong and worthless. With that caveat: we have our first respectable major DOOM prediction of 2016! Are there good reasons to be panicky about global financial markets right now? Absolutely! Oil prices are cratering to unbelievable lows, China’s growth that’s been propelling the whole world is…
Gold, the favored investment of Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and the old man at the post office who invited you over to see his industrial-size canned bean supply room, is down for the third straight year. Since peaking at “So many crazy fearful people” levels in 2011, the price of gold has fallen by 45%,…
The idea behind asset allocation is simple: when one market struggles, it’s OK because an investor can jump into another that is thriving. Not so in 2015. In fact, if you judge the past year by which U.S. investment class generated the largest return, a case can be made it was the worst for asset-allocating…
It’s now readily apparent that we’re in the midst of a new wave of college student protests. From the ConcernedStudent1950 movement that led to the ouster of University of Missouri president Tim Wolfe to the Million Student March that spanned 110 campuses and called for a debt-free education, campuses across the nation are witnessing an…
Marguerita Cheng, a certified financial planner and CEO of Blue Ocean Global Wealth, has a client in the Washington, DC area who makes $450,000 to $600,000 a year but lives paycheck to paycheck. He spends a lot of it on keeping peace with his ex-wife. Related: Guardian readers: US middle class is ‘living from one…
Dropbox just delivered some bad news for Mailbox users. The company will shut down its popular email app along with its its photo storage app Carousel, Dropbox announced Monday. Mailbox will be closed on Feb. 26, 2016; Carousel will shut down March 31, 2016. Reasons for closing the two apps were vague. Dropbox CEO Drew…
Excerpted from John Hussman’s Weekly Comment, The atmosphere is getting thin up here, and every ounce counts triple when you’re climbing in rarefied air. While near-term market dynamics are more likely to be impacted by Friday’s employment report than any other factor, our broad view remains that stocks are in the late-stage top formation of…
Welcome to a very special edition of people are worried about unicorns. They really are! The most worrying unicorn of them all, Square, went public last night at $9 per share, below its $11 to $13 marketing range. That gives it a valuation of $2.9 billion, not even a tricorn, and a sharp fall from the $6 billion sexacorn valuation…