Stocks are up. Bonds are expensive. Dollar cash is unlikely to preserve purchasing power in an environment of negative real rates. Diversifying to a basket of hard currencies might help to mitigate some of the risks out there. It clearly adds currency risk but in an environment where there may not be such a thing as a risk free asset, it might be a risk worth pursuing...

Penny stock volume as a percentage of Nasdaq volume became a very large percentage (3.2%) back in the dotcom bubble peak in February of 2000, reflecting that a high level of speculative trading was taking place. In the next few years the Nasdaq 100 lost over 80% of its value! Recently such penny stock volume has risen to a record high of 4.5%! Will it be different this time?

We have been in the throes of a secular bear market, subject to strong cyclical swings in either direction, since 2000. Currently, based on the 5 leading investment indicators analyzed in this article, the measures all confirm that, from a longer-term perspective, the market remains overvalued. Let's take a look at each to see why that is the case.

Roubini expects gold will fall below $1,000/oz. Here's why.

[To repeat,] Canada's concentrated bet on real estate and construction, while creating jobs in the short term, is putting Canadian economy at greater risk in the future [and, with it unlikely that] Canadian households will significantly increase disposable income in the near future, any deleveraging could therefore prove to be quite painful.

The Dow is just a "pinch away" from a series of resistance lines, ranging from 13 years to 31 years, that have marked important emotional highs & lows in the past suggesting that once the Dow reaches 16,000 or so it will correct.

It wasn't so long ago that irrational exuberance over the housing market had seized investors' logic, and the same thing is happening to US stocks right now. Fair-weather investors are abandoning gold equities and jumping into the US market in the hopes of making an easy buck, just as people bought property near the housing peak hoping to flip it before those adjustable-rate mortgages reset... My advice: don't gamble your savings on the hope that there will be a greater fool who will come along and buy your inflated assets at even higher prices.

The GNP numbers came out this week for the first quarter of 2013 and there was 1.8% growth yoy to $16.236 trillion...What does this mean to your equity positioning?

Two charts today, both from Goldman Sachs, focus on US equity valuations and suggest that the secular bear market in US stocks is over. Are we really experiencing an historical anomaly that falls into a "this time is different" narrative or is the current secular bear market not over just yet?

Are we headed for rampant inflation or crippling deflation? I believe that we will see both. The next major financial panic will cause a substantial deflationary wave first, and after that we will see unprecedented inflation as the central bankers and our politicians respond to the financial crisis. [Let me explain why I think that will unfold.] Words: 1025 Charts: 3