Author: starbpo

Anxiety about the election was already rising before a gunman at a campaign rally this past weekend tried to kill former President Donald Trump. As voters have been through the COVID-19 pandemic, the wild swings in the stock market that followed, and sharply rising consumer prices and interest rates, the shooting was just the latest event that made them feel uneasy. The American Psychiatric Association did a poll in April, and 73% of people said they were worried about the election. In the same way, Janus Henderson’s survey of investors 78% of wealthy and high-net-worth investors were worried about the…

The U.S. economy has gone into a downturn. The job market has slowed down. And prices are going down again. What else does the Federal Reserve need to do? Another sign that it’s time for interest rates to go down. The economy definitely needs a boost. Due to high interest rates, home sales have dropped sharply. High financing costs are making it hard to sell cars. Companies don’t want to invest. And so on. But the Fed has been lied to many times. First, by the biggest rise in inflation in 40 years, which happened in 2021 and 2022 after…

It looks like you can make money off of even a $5 meal. That’s what people who work in the restaurant business think about McDonald’s value-priced menu item. MCD 0.88% went live across the country last month. For $5, you get a McChicken or Double Cheeseburger sandwich, four Chicken McNuggets, a small order of french fries, and a small soft drink. According to a recent report, the budget-priced meal has been so popular that more than 90% of McDonald’s restaurants plan to keep selling it after the four-week promotion is over. A lot of people were complaining about how expensive…

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has given the go-ahead to a number of issuers to launch the first exchange-traded funds that invest directly in ether. After a sudden change of heart in May, the SEC approved the so-called 19b-4 filings from several stock exchanges asking for rule changes that would let them list ether ETFs. This is the last step in a two-step process. Tuesday is the first day that the ether ETFs will trade. This comes months after the spot bitcoin ETFs went live in January. A co-founder of the crypto venture capital firm Framework Ventures, Michael Anderson,…

Washington, D.C. An Associated Press poll done after President Joe Biden dropped his bid for reelection found that Vice President Kamala Harris has the support of enough Democratic delegates to become her party’s nominee against Republican Donald Trump. Biden backed Harris right after he said he wouldn’t run for the Democratic nomination, and she worked quickly to get the support of her party’s donors, lawmakers, and other leaders. The Associated Press, on the other hand, does not call Harris the new likely nominee. That’s because the convention delegates can still choose which candidate to support at the August convention or…

Financials, industrials and materials sectors are the most consistent Trump trades. The S&P 500 SPX 1.08% has gone down when Donald Trump’s chances of winning the 2024 election have gone up, and up when they have gone down. Traders in stocks need to know this because the political scene in the U.S. is changing so quickly, especially now that Joe Biden has dropped out of the race for president. A lot of traders make decisions about their portfolios based on their political views instead of an objective analysis of the facts. For this column, I looked at how the weekly…

The higher a stock soars, the more likely it is to plunge. An unknown sentiment index says that the U.S. stock market will probably do worse than average over the next 24 months. This includes 25 popular, high-flying U.S. stocks, such as Nvidia. 4.76 percent for NVDA, SMCI for Super Micro Computer, and AVGO for Broadcom. The market index, called the “U.S. Crash Confidence Index,” was created by Robert Shiller at Yale University 40 years ago and is now taken care of by the Yale School of Management. A group of individual and institutional investors are asked every month, “What…

On Sunday, President Joe Biden dropped out of the race for president in 2024 and immediately backed Vice President Kamala Harris. Investors should expect a Harris administration to support the economic policies that Biden put in place during his term. These policies include the Inflation Reduction Act’s subsidies for electric cars and green energy projects, more money for the IRS to go after wealthy tax cheats, taxes on stock buybacks, and a 15% corporate minimum tax for big businesses. A Harris presidency would basically be the same as the Biden administration, according to Isaac Boltansky, director of policy research at…

An issue with the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. caused Microsoft Corp. systems all over the world to go down. This could be the biggest outage ever. CrowdStrike’s stock CRWD, -11.10% dropped sharply on Friday after the outage. It had its worst day in more than 19 months. Computers that were powered by Microsoft MSFT, -0.74% were affected by the huge outage. It messed up flights and hurt banks, publishers, and many other businesses around the world. The outages were blamed on CrowdStrike by both governments and airlines. CrowdStrike’s stock fell 11.1% on Friday, the most in one day since…

If Donald Trump wins the election and lets Chinese cars into the U.S., Tesla Inc. and other companies that make electric cars will have to deal with a lot of price competition. Trump said he was okay with Chinese automakers moving production to the U.S. from Mexico in his speech at the Republican National Convention on Thursday night. He said this would create jobs in the U.S. auto industry. Trump also said he would put tariffs on Mexican auto imports to make it harder for Americans to buy cars made in other countries. Trump said, “Plants will be built in…