Hello traders everywhere!  Adam Hewison here, co-founder of MarketClub with your mid-day market update for Friday, the 9th of December. Stocks in the News DuPont Co., the most valuable US chemical maker, cut its 2011 earnings forecast by 10 cents. We analyze this stock for you today. Euro up, Euro down Today, we will take a close look at the euro and...

By Elliott Wave International Is the bank really the safest place to keep your money? Robert Prechter joins the Mind of Money host Douglass Lodmell to discuss what backs bank deposits and how you can keep your hard-earned money safe. We invite you to watch the interview below. Then read Robert Prechter’s free report, Discover the Top 100 Safest...

Submitted by Tyler Durden Yay verily, Michigan Consumer Confidence jumped more than expected and there was rejoicing all around. Of course, a simple scratch beneath the surface reveals what many realists suspect, expectations for the future are the major driver of the headline number. Unfortunately we have seen exactly this pattern before. Not only...

How many European bankers does it take to change a light bulb? That’s a joke in search of an answer, but EWI’s European analyst Brian Whitmer explained five months ago that the “light bulb moment” was coming — that’s the time when most people would clearly recognize the severity of the European debt crisis. He offered...

Given the failure of the “RISK OFF” trade to develop any serious downside momentum this week, I am using the dip this morning to take a small profit on my S&P 500 ETF (SPY) puts. We had every reason to go down, given the Standard and Poor’s threatened European debt downgrade on Monday night. If this despised and deeply flawed ratings agency...

Fallond Stock Picks Morning action had suggested 200-day MAs had finally proven to be a step too far for the indices, but a late day recovery placed the pressure back on these key moving averages. Certainly, there is strong indication 200-day MAs will be broken to the upside. The S&P found support at the back test of declining resistance turned...

Americans looking south of the Rio Grande tend to forget, if they ever knew, that Mexico is, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, now America’s second largest source of imports. Of the United States’ total crude oil imports averaging 9,033 thousand barrels per day (tbpd), Mexico is the second largest source of imports,...

By Jeff Clark, Casey Research A young woman – let’s call her Andrea – inherited some money from her father in late 1997. She was only nineteen at the time. Not knowing the first thing about investing, she kept the money in stocks and bonds as her father had, wanting to hold on to it until she really needed it. She played it “safe.” She...

Earlier this week, Standard & Poor’s placed Germany, France and 13 other eurozone nations on negative credit watch, saying “continuing disagreements among European policy makers on how to tackle” the region’s debt crisis risk is damaging their financial stability.  Furthermore, S&P warned that the European Financial Stability Facility...

I am pulling the plug on my short position in the Euro here, selling my Euro ETF (FXE) January, 2012 $134 puts at cost. It’s not that I have suddenly fallen in love with the beer drinkers and the garlic eaters. This is an option driven decision. With market volatility falling across all asset classes, the short dated options are eroding away faster...

by Karl Denninger There is probably nobody in the political/government scene that I detest more than Ben Bernanke.  But this does not mean that politicians showing the mental acuity of a 2-year old should feel free to take false shots at his policy actions and those of The Fed generally. Yet they have. Bernie Sanders, for example, has been screaming...

Courtesy of Bruce Krasting Full calendar year 2011 numbers are now available to calculate the results for the Social Security Trust Fund. Here’s a look at the key numbers that will be reported to Congress in four months: Payroll Tax Revenue: $669B ($642B – 2010) Benefit payments: $726B ($702B -  2010) Primary Deficit: $57B ($60B -  2010) Other...

Tim Iacono From this report at Der Spiegel comes the terrifying chart below showing how dramatically ECB (European Central Bank) bond buying has increased in recent months. This comes at a time when European banks have increasingly relied on the ECB’s emergency liquidity programs and expectations are being lowered by the hour for this week’s summit. Of...

By Elliott Wave International Lost in the clamor over the central banks’ “let there be liquidity” pronouncement, Standard & Poor’s just downgraded fifteen major U.S. and European banks. The downgrade doesn’t mean Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Barclays, UBS, Wells Fargo and others will close shop tomorrow....

by The Mad Hedge Fund Trader I heard the magic words today from German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Nicolas Sarkozy: “treaty changes”. That will be the gist of their joint proposal at the European summit this coming Friday to deal with the sovereign debt crisis. To me, this means that the two besieged leaders are finally biting...