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Moscow-led trade bloc and the Uranium market

January 2, 2015 by Matt McCracken
Armenia joined the Russian-led trade bloc that previously included Belarus and Kazakhstan. While these countries may seem insignficant in most sectors of the worldwide economy, Kazakhstan is actually very signfigant in one small but important market...Read more

Charles Schwab's Outlook on Bonds

December 23, 2014 by Matt McCracken
I am just listening to some music on Youtube and between every song, there now seems to be a commerical. I have now listened to a couple different messages from the folks at Charles Schwab. And the second one I was like, WOW!!! Are you kidding me?...Read more

Is the a commodity backed Ruble coming?

December 22, 2014 by Matt McCracken
The crashing Russian Ruble has been the big story line from the past couple of weeks. From here, there are only two options for the currency. Continue to crash on its way to zero or breakout out of the parabolic downtrend and rebound. While the...Read more
USO performance dispersion

The Epic Failure of Commodity Funds

July 24, 2014 by Matt McCracken
The strong performance of commodities since the end of the tech bubble has attracted quite a lot of interest and assets under management to the space. Prior to 1999, there were virtually no public funds trading commodity futures on US exchanges (...Read more

Per capita Soybean inventories at generational lows

June 25, 2014 by Matt McCracken
This morning bean prices are ticking slightly upward on news inventories are depleting. How low are bean inventories? From Bloomberg.com: U.S. soybean reserves on June 1 were probably 382 million bushels, the smallest for that date since 1977,...Read more

FED's Interest rate hike and the USD

March 14, 2014 by Matt McCracken
The popular view is higher interest rates should be supportive of the underlying currency. The idea is simply that a higher yielding currency is more attractive to investors. And given that the USD is the only major currency yielding anything, the...Read more

MONEYBALL - THE MOVIE

February 6, 2014 by Matt McCracken
A CRITICAL LESSON FOR ALL INVESTORS I just saw the movie Moneyball this weekend and I have to say the filmmakers did a better than decent job of telling the remarkable story of Billy Beane and how his unconventional methodologies built a severely...Read more

The CPI Lie

April 8, 2011 by Matt McCracken
PART I: INTRODUCTION There are lies, damn lies and then there are statistics! - Mark Twain - Have you noticed that what you pay at the pump or the check-out counter seems to have little correlation with government inflation figures? Does it seem...Read more

"Act of God" blamed for Bad Unemployment Report

February 4, 2011 by Matt McCracken
This morning I turned on one of the financial media stations to see what was going on in the markets and the big news was the BLS Employment Report which provided some not-so-optimistic figures. A couple analysts on the show were cackling about how...Read more