Omar’s Quick Chart – Ethereum’s Growing Dominance
In spite of cryptocurrencies now numbering in the thousands, it is interesting to see that not only is the overall crypto market still largely dominated by Bitcoin and Ethereum in terms of sheer volume traded, but that the latter seems to taking overall leadership.
Omar’s Quick Chart – Uranium is the talk of the Street
The strong recent performance of uranium stocks has caught Wall St.’s attention, with a growing narrative taking hold of an heavily skewed supply/demand imbalance leading to ever stronger uranium prices, the product of years of lowered production and dwindling inventories colliding with growing demand mandated by green policy initiatives from governments. To me, the jury […]
Omar’s Quick Charts – BOC vs. CESI – Canada
Today’s Bank of Canada (BOC) decision to maintain the overnight rate at 0.25% and the pace of Quantitative Easing to $2b of assets purchased a week is not overly surprising given the context of an economic backdrop that looks to be decelerating, when looking at the following chart for Canada of the Citi Economic Surprise […]
Omar’s Quick Take – Gold Forming Multi-Year Symmetrical Triangle Pattern
Having suffered a nearly decade-long bear market through much of the 2010s, gold began a blistering ascent back in late 2018, having essentially doubled in price by its most recent peak back in September of last year. We initially took on our full precious metals exposure in the Growth and Aggressive Growth models back in […]
Omar’s Quick Take: D is for Demographics
Concerns about inflation have taken center stage in the financial and mainstream press over the past six months as various Consumer Price Index (CPI) and Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) readings have come in relatively red-hot, at least compared to the past decade. There has been considerable commentary from various pundits about how these readings are […]
Omar’s Quick Take – Bitcoin, Gold, and S&P500 Correlations
With a lot of the conversation around the utility of cryptocurrencies seeming to shift from their use as practical alternative means of exchange to instead being thought of as a new asset class, one should probably then evaluate what would be the benefits of adding such an asset class to a portfolio. Notwithstanding the stellar […]
Omar’s Quick Take – Late Winter Market Turbulence
After an early February that saw many equity markets soar to new highs, the back half of February into March has seen those early year-to-date gains evaporate in a selling spell that looks to be the first material equity markets pullback of 2021. The culprit? A relatively rapid rise in bond market interest rates, especially […]
Omar’s Quick Take – Who’s Scared of Deficits? Not the MMT Crowd
As governments around the world have unleashed massive deficit spending to offset the devastating economic impacts that their public health policies have engendered, many economists and market participants have begun to wonder what future fiscal policy measures will be needed to tackle these deficits and increased government debt. One of the first things that come […]
Omar’s Quick Take – China Social Credit Impact on Asset Classes
Due to the sheer size of the Chinese economy and its corollary impact on global markets, many market participants have paid close attention to the social financing policies of Chinese authorities and the ensuing credit impulses they have generated. As seen from the following chart, you can see the last major impulse was initiated at […]
General Commentary – December 2020
The Year of Plague and Politics As we close out a year that few will likely ever forget, we are reassured to see some major risks fade into the rearview mirror and some hopeful developments coming ever closer into reach. We outlined in our July commentary the case for why, for the first time in […]