We wish all of our readers a happy, healthy, and peaceful New Year. Tomorrow, we will post the year-end review looking ahead at the New Year — 2016.

It was a very dull day to finish 2015, but not really surprising given the performance we have seen for the year. Shanghai has finished the year up 9.4%, but it was the smaller Shenzhen Composite with a YTD gain of 63.2% that was the shining star. The Nikkei added to its annual gain by […]

Iraq warns that it will take military action against Turkey if they do not withdraw their troops from their territory. This would get complicated since Turkey is a member of NATO. So who is on whose side? Is Turkey just abusing its NATO status to attack Russia for seven seconds of violating its air space when […]

  NASDAQ and NYSE are acting really insane and cancelling stop loss orders and GTC (good until cancelled). It appears that these types of orders will be discretionary with some brokers, but the exchanges will not accept them. The problem becomes the burden of putting these orders in every day. Look for brokers who will […]

The banks of Hungary and Portugal are in trouble. Larger buffers are needed and the economy has not yet moved into a full crisis mode. That is yet to come.

  Below is the holiday schedule for the markets. The closing for our models will be TODAY, and for the most part, this will be a full normal day. We are hovering around our year-end numbers in many markets from gold, the pound, to oil and the Dow. If the Dow closes lower than last […]

The hunt for money is absolutely destroying everything. The IRS has placed a maximum on the depreciation of assets. Any high-end cars over $40,000 must be paid for with after tax dollars. This will have some impact on the high-end markets. States are already sharing revenue and info. As of January 2014, if you buy […]

The New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ are terminating stop-loss and good-til-canceled orders beginning Feb. 26, 2016. They are claiming risks occur from such orders during volatile trading. They are really admitting that there is a liquidity crisis. Additionally, going after high frequency trading and demanding that they turn over the source code to the […]

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has announced that it’s suspending a hugely controversial program that allows local police departments to keep a large portion of assets seized from citizens under federal law and funnel it into their own coffers. This program has been converting police agencies into criminal organizations by seizing people’s money without any connection to a […]

Asia finished a mixed session with gains in Shanghai (+0.25%) and Japan (+0.27%), countered with a small decline in the HSI (-0.53%). For Japan, today was the last trading day for 2015 and returned a yearly gain of just over 9%. European core indices fell across the spectrum with losses for DAX (-1.08%), CAC (-0.52%), […]