We’ve recently passed six months since the April 2025 market low.  And when the market has risen this far for this long, investors often get super anxious about that next correction which could wipe out all of those previous gains.

A first-time viewer of my daily market recap show recently asked, “So what was driving the big move higher today?”  We always want to know what caused the market to move in a certain way. In reality, while a big news event certainly can and does move markets very quickly, sometimes a trend just persists.

Change can be overwhelming.  And even though I’ve read Paulo Coehlo’s The Alchemist numerous times, it can still be pretty hard to navigate big changes in my life. We just got back from visiting my daughter who is immersing herself in music as a high school senior at Interlochen Arts Academy.  This has meant a significant change for all of us…

There are generally two ways you can approach investing in the stock market.  

A top-down approach means you start at the macro level, evaluating broad market conditions and then identifying sectors and stocks that should do well given your macroeconomic assumptions.

As an investing community, we love to hang on every word, if not every syllable, that is uttered by a Federal Reserve governor. And while the Fed serves a vital role as an independent agency charged with the dual mandate of maximum employment and stable prices, and has overall served that role pretty well, we also love to complain about how they often tend to be too early, too late, or just plain wrong.

I often find that investors often consider “bearishness” and "pessimism" to be synonyms.  Any time I’ve shared a cautious tone in my own work, I’ve often gotten questions along the lines of, “Why are you being so pessimistic?” Bullishness and bearishness for me are temporary states…

The market is gearing up for today’s earnings report from Magnificent 7 standout Nvidia.  No other stock perhaps encapsulates the AI-fueled bull market of 2025 as much as NVDA, which has powered off its April low to achieve another new all-time high this month.

While technical analysis does not necessarily help us predict the outcome of earnings releases, it can help us better assess investor psychology leading into their latest report.  Let’s review the evidence for Nvidia…

I recently spent a week up in the hills of southwest New Hampshire, making music and making new friends at the Walden School’s Creative Musicians Retreat.  A group of composers, performers, and musicians of all ages come together for a week-long festival celebrating creativity and community.

“Think you’d want to teach the course with me this fall?”  

I was on the phone with legendary technical analyst Charlie Kirkpatrick, co-author of the book Technical Analysis: The Complete Resource for Financial Market Technicians.  Bruce Kamich has told me that Charlie was looking to step back from the technical analysis course he had created for Brandeis University, and I was thrilled that he even considered me to step in and continue the program.

I will never forget the first time I sat down with a growth-oriented portfolio manager.  I was working for Bloomberg, and my job was to help financial professionals see how they could use our product to improve their investment returns. 

As an aspiring technical analyst, I was excited to show them some of the charting tools I was using, many of which had been huge hits at the hedge funds I’d been working with.

I very quickly discovered that my “mean-reversion-buy-low-sell-high” approach was exactly the opposite of what this guy was looking for.