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A truly skilled writer would attempt to build up a little suspense before revealing the central theme of this section. But in this makeshift world of sixty-game baseball schedules and seven-inning doubleheaders, who has the time or patience for that?

The breakeven rates capture the spirit of the overall risk rally and continue to provide support. The change in the Fed’s policy goals means it will remain accommodative for even longer.

While most economic numbers have been positive, the fly-in-the-ointment was the latest Senior Loan Officers’ Survey. Banks have tightened their lending standards across the board.

The combination of rebounding economic activity and a surging enchantment with mega-cap growth stocks is pressing investors to make an important tactical call: whether or not to exit some highfliers and shift assets to sectors with more cyclical exposure.

AdvantHedge was down 8.3% in August, trailing the inverse S&P 500 (-7.2%) and the inverse Russell 2000 (-5.6%).

The Leuthold Core and Global Portfolios turned in positive performance in August, but failed to keep pace with large cap stocks.

Read this week's Major Trend.

The S&P 500 continued to shrug off long-term valuation averages, gaining 7% in August.

Read this week's Major Trend.

Replay of a ZOOM Call with Chief Investment Strategist, Jim Paulsen where he shares his thoughts and observations on today's market and what he sees looking ahead.

Read this week's Major Trend.

Read this week's Major Trend.

Growth investing is in the midst of a spectacular run this year, extending its decade-long dominance over the Value style. Chart 1 depicts the Growth / Value relationship over the last 25 years through July 31^st, with key turning points marked by vertical lines.

Read this week's Major Trend. 

With “reopening” taking a pause, we expect global policies to remain accommodative even longer. Among fixed income, we like corporate credit, which includes both investment grade and high yield bonds.

We geek it up a notch and use some of the popular text-processing techniques to quantify the hawkish/dovish sentiment of the latest Fed statement. Some human “coaching” is needed in every step of the process (hence the “artificial” part). But when these tools are used properly for carefully chosen tasks, they can be quite intelligent.

July’s surge drove the yellow metal to the brink of its overvaluation threshold, where only 150 ounces of gold are required to buy the median-priced existing home (currently about $299,000). Impressively, gold made all but the last month of this move without attracting mainstream attention.

As troubled sectors vary from downturn to downturn, commercial banks have shown an uncanny ability to leap in front of each cycle’s proverbial pie truck. This time, it’s hard to identify the precise epicenter—especially amidst all the bailouts.

So what do we make of July’s “low-risk” VLT BUY signal on the DJIA—the index on which the indicator’s creator (Sedge Coppock) did his original work? Sadly, not much.

As we go to press (said no one in the digital age, ever!), the S&P 500 was moving to within a couple percentage points of its February 19th all-time high. Given still-high valuations for the blue chips and increasingly frothy sentiment, we think any break above that high will be underwhelming, if not a potentially historic “trap.”