To be a successful trader demands knowledge. If you’d prefer to become an unsuccessful trader, you can start by making the following common trading mistakes, detailed by a professional who spent 25 years in portfolio management, trading and forecasting in the financial capital of the world, ...

By Jeff Clark, Senior Editor, Casey’s Gold & Resource Report The talk of a possible double dip is now common banter on TV investment programs. And indeed, deflationary forces seem to have the stronger grip right now than inflationary ones. So if deflation is the next reality we have to face, what happens to our favorite stock investments? There’s...

THANK YOU for the overwhelming positive feedback to the information I posted on Tuesday. You can find that post HERE. If you haven’t already grabbed these 4 great reports (they’re FREE) on how to improve your Trading Discipline, please do so now while they’re still available…Norman’s 4 FREE Special Reports  will put ...

The Market Ticker Let’s talk about the economy – and the lack of jobs. In the week ending July 31, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 479,000, an increase of 19,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 460,000. The 4-week moving average was 458,500, an increase of 5,250 from the previous week’s...

(Wednesday) the market gapped down 1.5% at the opening bell which set a very negative tone for the session. Volume was screaming as protective stops triggered and traders close out positions before prices fell much further. This gap seemed to have caught several traders off guard but those of you who follow my newsletter knew something big was ...

Tim Iacono As if there weren’t enough other pressing issues to occupy the country’s collective mind, Allan Sloan of Fortune Magazine reminds us how “useless” the Social Security Trust Fund is in this story from the other day that included the rather disturbing image shown below. There’s real money and then there’s funny money — stuff...

by Tyler Durden Cisco misses and stock drops 8%. In the meantime, futures are now plumbing the day’s lows after hours. And the most troubling development from CSCO, worse than the top line miss, is the catch courtesy of Bloomberg’s Adam Johnson that Days Sales Outstanding surge from 27 to 41 days. Customers incrasingly refuse to pay...

The Market Ticker Amazing.  Simply amazing: Aug. 11 (Bloomberg) — Let’s get real. The U.S. is bankrupt. Neither spending more nor taxing less will help the country pay its bills. What it can and must do is radically simplify its tax, health-care, retirement and financial systems, each of which is a complete mess. But this is the good news....

by CalculatedRisk The Census Bureau reports: [T]otal June exports of $150.5 billion and imports of $200.3 billion resulted in a goods and services deficit of $49.9 billion, up from $42.0 billion in May, revised. The first graph shows the monthly U.S. exports and imports in dollars through June 2010. Clearly imports are increasing much faster than...

by Tyler Durden Just when you thought gold could go through at least one major selloff day without some remarkable fireworks, here comes a perfectly natural $10 selloff in the span of under a minute, because that is precisely how a quantized and “deep” order book looks like. Just how related this is with the reopening of the ECB’s...

Tim Iacono Anyone wanting to see a demonstration of how a “bond-bullion barbell” portfolio moves on a day when nearly everything seems to be going down need look no further than a few representative indexes and ETFs as shown below, in which Treasuries and gold bullion are the only green in a sea of red. Note that gold stocks are clearly siding...

via PragCap The rapid pace of the decline is especially conspicuous when lending growth is compared across past recession-recovery cycles. Loans have tended to increase on average during the recovery phase. Only in 1990–1993 did loans decline at a comparable pace at this stage of the business cycle. Tight lending standards have contributed...

Tim Iacono Well, so much for Ben Bernanke and the brain trust at the Federal Reserve not wanting to appear overly concerned about the flagging economic recovery in the U.S. and not wanting to set expectations too high for QE II (i.e., trillions more in money printing). A short time ago the central bank’s policy making committed released a statement...

The single most convenient untruth about the 2008 (and counting) financial crisis is that it was unforeseen. For two years policymakers have insisted “There was no way to know ahead of time” that the liquidity boom would come to a screeching halt. Back in November 2008, in...

Video: The Real-Time Power of Elliott Wave Analysis Mainstream financial analysts always look for ways to explain market action through news stories and events. Conventional wisdom states that news and inter-market correlations cause market booms and busts, but such explanations rely on selective presentation of the data. In this video, Elliott Wave...