After a disappointing few years for precious metals investors, gold is finally taking the lead. With a 12.2 percent year-to-date rally for gold futures and a 9.3 percent year-to-date rise for the S&P 500, 2017 is set to be the first year in which the yellow metal has beaten stocks since 2011. In that year, […]
Read moreIt’s not just food safety issues affecting Chipotle now. Rising food costs are increasingly a problem for the restaurant chain’s profitability, says one Wall Street firm. Credit Suisse lowered its price target and reiterated its neutral rating for shares of the burrito restaurant chain, citing risk to future earnings due to higher avocado prices. “We […]
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Hurricane Harvey could barrel into the U.S. Gulf Coast as a Category 3 hurricane, an event that has historically tended to send utilities and insurance stocks lower. Harvey is quickly turning into the worst hurricane to hit the U.S. mainland in more than a decade, and is expected to strengthen from a Category 2 to […]
Read moreGasoline prices surged over the last two days as Hurricane Harvey headed toward the U.S. Gulf Coast refining hub, but analysts warned that the price difference against crude oil could come crashing back down next week. The weather event is pushing up gasoline prices because a number of refineries have shut down. Flooding threatens to […]
Read moreWall Street punished GameStop on Friday, a day after the company posted weaker-than-expected earnings and margins. The stock price was down more than 13 percent Friday afternoon. Despite strong revenue and same store sales, GameStop’s earnings per share fell just shy of estimates. The video game retailer posted adjusted second-quarter earnings of 15 cents per […]
Read moreFederal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen has been scrupulously avoiding discussion of specific details on the future of monetary policy, leaving economists to draw inferences from her sentiments about the health of the overall economy. “If you hear Janet Yellen say something like, ‘Well, gee, we really don’t think that lending has grown excessively,’ that’s a […]
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SAMSUNG’S founding family, the Lees, have good reason to dislike room 417 of Seoul’s Central District Court. In 2008 it was where Lee Kun-hee, the chairman of the sprawling South Korean conglomerate, was found guilty of tax evasion. On August 25th his son, Lee Jae-yong, the vice-chairman of Samsung Electronics, stood in the same room […]
Read moreGoogle is issuing refunds to advertisers whose ads ran on its sites later found to have fake traffic, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. The refunds are being made while Google works on a tool to give online marketers more transparency into the ads they buy via the company’s technology, known as […]
Read moreThe threat of a stock market correction may keep the Trump administration and the GOP in Congress focused on getting something done this fall. Strategas Chief Investment Officer Jason DeSena Trennert sees the stock market as the new vigilante, tempering the actions of policymakers much like the bond market behaved in the 1980s and 1990s. […]
Read moreElon Musk says artificial intelligence is a bigger threat than North Korea. Bill Gates has suggested that it will be necessary for companies to pay a “robot tax” as they increasingly replace workers with automation. But the rise of machine intelligence isn’t all bad. Case in point: it’s made possible a robot dance party which […]
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