January 2018
Annual year in review issues always produce some surprises.
In recent years, futures commission merchants (FCMs) have focused on creating efficiencies and adjusting to the “new normal” which included increased regulatory and compliance costs, tougher competition in a mature consolidating industry, dealing with aggressive product pricing from exchanges and perhaps most significantly, a more than decade-long low interest rate environment.
On July 3, 2017, Standpoint Research founder Ronnie Moas initiated coverage on bitcoin. He recommended investors purchase it at $2,570. By Nov.17, the price neared $8,000.
Also, bitcoin has experienced two forks since Aug. 1, so when you include both bitcoin cash and bitcoin gold in the value, it is considerably higher on a split-adjusted basis.
Adamas Pharmaceuticals (ADMS), a small-cap drug company, will soon launch a treatment for patients with Parkinson’s disease called Gocovri. The mainstay therapy for Parkinson’s is a drug called Levodopa, which usually works well but frequently causes involuntary and often painful movements called dyskinesias.
Weibo (WB) is a Chinese internet play that is up 174% year-to-date and 148% over last one-year period. Earnings have been on the ascent with three consecutive positive quarterly reports. The stock rallied 15.2% in the first half of November.
The Cycle Projection Oscillator (CPO) is a technical tool that employs proprietary statistical techniques and complex algorithms to filter multiple cycles from historical data, combines them to obtain cyclical information from price data and then gives a graphical representation of their productive behavior.
This month, we’ll focus on two related markets at opposite ends of their respective trends, cattle and corn. The domestic cattle industry has been expanding its herds for the last couple of years. Ranchers have taken advantage of low grain prices to hold cattle back, and drive up prices. After recently reaching a 60-year low, the U.S.
Prothena Corp. PLC (PRTA) is a $2.4 billion development-stage biotechnology company whose stock has climbed more than 700% since its spin-off from Elan (ELN) in December 2012. We are certain that its lead asset, NEOD001, will fail its ongoing Phase 2b and Phase 3 trials.
Snap Inc. (SNAP) has been a reliable short since its overpriced IPO in March (see “The Banana Republic of Snapchat,” MT April 2017). SNAP is a social media play down 49% since inception. Earnings momentum is about as weak as it can be, with its only three quarterly reports producing double digits sell-offs of 14.6%, 14.1% and 21.4%.
If you want to invest in the hot technology sector, but are looking to drill down to a more specific niche, you may want to look at the Business Software Services sub-sector. This is a Zacks industry sub-sector with 12 public companies. This active information technology niche is currently ranked #21 out of the 265 sectors Zacks rank, which puts it in the top 8%.
While there still continues to be an ongoing debate around the value of cryptocurrencies, with well-known CEOs such as Jamie Dimon claiming it is a fraud and many others wondering if there is any practical use for them. An opinion that is far less controversial is the value of the blockchain.
The pendulum of market sentiment swings ever back and forth between fear and greed.
In November La Quinta Holdings (LQ), trading at $17.05 for a market cap $2 billion, announced plans to separate its real estate business—to be named CorePoint Lodging Inc.—from its franchise and management businesses to create two distinct, publicly traded companies. La Quinta Holdings has hotels throughout the United States, Canada and Mexico.
Exchange -traded funds (ETFs) can represent a specific index such as the SPY or even an underlying commodity, but many are created to capture smaller slices of an equity sector. How they are labeled can too often be about marketing and can inaccurately represent what they hold.
The covered call is a well-known, widely liked option strategy. But often overlooked is the equally attractive uncovered, or naked put.
Trading is hard, even for grizzled veterans, so anyone looking to trade needs to do their due diligence, especially when selecting their broker.