finance charts

This post is part of my chart of the day series.

Inflation is clearly still a problem. The CPI for May 2008 was released by the BLS today showing consumer inflation rising at a 4.2% rate y-o-y, unadjusted for seasonal factors. This is either good news or bad news, depending on how you…

The U.S. Department of Labor just released the weekly report for unemployment insurance claims. Initial claims were 384,000, while continuing claims rose to 3.139 million. The 4-week average moved up to 3,099,250. This is 593,000 more…

This is what the recently released retail sales data look like over a longer time-frame.

This is what consumer inflation has looked like in the United States.

Every week the U.S. Department of Labor puts out the previous week's jobless claims statistics through its Employment and Training Administration (Doleta). Analysts look at it to get a sense of how employment is being affected by the…

Economists have a way of coming up with more ratios and statistics than you can shake a stick at. True to my profession, I have developed a long-term yardstick of market overvaluation and undervaluation. I have no short-hand for it yet so…

Knowing when to invest is just as important as investing at all. When one analyzes the returns in the market over longer periods (5+ years), it becomes obvious that certain periods of investing are much less lucrative than others. We are…

Remember when you used to hear pundits say "'Buy and Hold,' that's the ticket to shareholder wealth?" Is that really true? I have put this thesis to the test over a number of years and it just doesn't hold water. Bear markets are always…

Question: Could one see a bubble in housing back in 2005 when house prices were still rising? Well, to answer that question, I took the S&P/Case-Shiller Composite 10 Index and mapped it the rate of inflation. See, Robert Shiller, one…