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Ahead of this quarter’s 13F filing from Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, we already knew it was going to be far less exciting than the last one we got. As the company recently reported, Berskhire racked up $3.8 billion in net stock purchases in the second quarter, far short of the $41 billion it bought up in the first quarter of this year (it also spent far less on stock buybacks during Q2).Additionally, some of the positions that aren't being disclosed today include the company’s stake in Occidental Petroleum, even though we already are aware of these thanks to recent filings....

A shocking year at Six Flags ends in the loss of nearly two million customers and a collapse in stock value. The world's largest theme park operator reported the loss in attendance following the implementation of an initiative to lessen the presence of 'rowdy teenagers' in their parks, according to the company's CEO Selim Bassoul. The Texas-based theme park's shares tumbled 18% to $21.12 Thursday after it disclosed attendance at its 27 parks was down 22% from this time last year, which is wildly different when compared to Disney's reported 70% rise in park attendance year-over-year. Bassoul, who was named...

"I will remember December 23, 2016 for the rest of my life. It was my last day working a full-time job. My wife and I retired early at 33 and 35, respectively, after accumulating $870,000 working in information technology. With the help of the market, our net worth increased to $1 million shortly after."

History can be a powerful tool, particularly in a high-inflation environment like this one in which no suitable economic model seems to apply. Inflation — running at 8.3% as of April, near a four-decade high — has stayed stubbornly persistent for a full year to the surprise of virtually everyone who tracks it. Now there’s a risk that price gains could take much longer than expected to fall back down, even when the Federal Reserve is aggressively hiking interest rates. That risk was highlighted on Thursday by BofA Securities strategists Vadim Iaralov, Howard Du and others, who point to the...

No communist was ever as dedicated to economic suicide as the current class of idiots who rule us…High inflation, over-regulation, and a general sense that things are going in the wrong direction remind us of the late 1970s and early ’80s. But today the underlying problems that were responsible for our woes in that time are vastly worse. The coming reckoning for Washington’s insanely irresponsible monetary policy may dwarf the troubles from all recent recessions and periods of inflation. The Federal Reserve has created a doom loop between the housing market and inflation. For years it has printed tens of...

“Specie (gold and silver coin) is the most perfect medium because it will preserve its own level, because having intrinsic and universal value, it can never die in our hands, and it is the surest resource of reliance in time of war.” – Thomas Jefferson Since no current President or Prime Minister nor any Central Bank Chairman understands what money is or the relevance of gold, we turn above back to history and Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president for a proper definition. Jefferson also understood that “Paper is Poverty, It is only the Ghost of Money, and not Money...

Everything Everywhere All At OnceToday’s title, referencing a soon-to-be-released movie that looks a superior version of a multiverse of madness than the one starring Dr Strange, nicely sums up our current global situation. Everything is happening everywhere all at once – yet key markets are failing to capture it or aren’t explaining the second or third order implications where they are. US stocks failed to carry over the Friday dead-cat bounce on Monday, with the S&P -0.4% and the NASDAQ -1.2%. Treasury yields correspondingly went down, with the 10-year at 2.88% (-6bps) and the 2-year at 2.54% (-3bps). So did...

David Wright is known for his ability to lead his funds through periods of intense volatility, like 2008, where his fund nearly broke even on the year while the major equity index shed half of their value. His losses during the COVID rout of 2020 were also relatively mild. But those market ructions will likely be remembered as relatively staid in comparison to the selloff that’s just around the corner. According to Wright, who shared his thoughts on the market during an interview with Bloomberg, both of these periods – along with the dotcom crash – both had nothing on...

Despite all the talk about a “strong economy,” nobody was expecting a blistering hot GDP for the first quarter. The consensus was for around a 1% gain. As it turned out, it was even worse than expected. GDP shrank in Q1, contracting by 1.4%. Despite the awful number, the mainstream spun it as a positive. Peter Schiff called it an outrageous positive spin on negative GDP and a great example of Orwellian doublespeak. A New York Times headline proclaimed, “GDP Report Shows US Economy Shrank, Masking a Broader Recovery” Basically, the NYT and others in the mainstream media are claiming...

More analysts, economists, and former Federal Reserve officials are predicting a recession – one that will stagger the U.S. economy. That’s frightening investors into selling profitable positions and going to the sidelines.I say they’re wrong and getting out of the market now is a mistake.So, in today’s Total Wealth, I’m telling you what these recession hawks are saying, why they’re saying it, and what the reality is.Rising VoicesGoldman Sachs economists made news this week predicting the economy will see a recession in the next two years.A Bloomberg survey of 77 economists in February had 15% calling for a recession this...

“The essence of leadership is being able to see the iceberg before it hits the Titanic.”Markets are being whipsawed by rate hike threats from Central Banks, China lockdowns, the Ukraine war, while being stalked by inflation and stagflation. The big risk remains policy mistakes – trying to solve these with the wrong monetary and fiscal policies. Taking a look at the stock markets its well windy out there. The Federal Reserve is threatening to raise interest rates at a clip – even the ECB might get its act together later this summer, while the Chinese are double padlocking doors across...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Ukraine's two leading suppliers of neon, which produce about half the world's supply of the key ingredient for making chips, have halted their operations as Moscow has sharpened its attack on the country, threatening to raise prices and aggravate the semiconductor shortage. Some 45% to 54% of the world's semiconductor-grade neon, critical for the lasers used to make chips, comes from two Ukrainian companies, Ingas and Cryoin, according to Reuters calculations based on figures from the companies and market research firm Techcet. Global neon consumption for chip production reached about 540 metric tons last year, Techcet estimates. Both...

SNIP Investing $1,000: The commercial from Apple aired during the third quarter of the Super Bowl. The ad highlighted an upcoming product, which proved to be a major catalyst for Apple. Anyone watching the commercial who felt like it was well done, might have been convinced that Apple could compete in the computer space, and may have chosen to invest in shares of the company. Apple traded at a split-adjusted price of $0.13 on the Monday after Super Bowl XVII (Jan. 23, 1984). A $1,000 investment could have purchased 7,692.31 shares of AAPL. The $1,000 investment in AAPL shares would...

Russian stock market sank 17 per cent in Monday's trade as President Vladimir Putin said his country was mulling recognising the independence of east Ukraine's two separatist republics, further escalating the Ukraine crisis. Europe markets were all in the red.

Apple first topped the $1 trillion market cap level in August 2018. It wasn’t until September 2019 that it retook the trillion-dollar market and began accelerating. The March 2020 COVID collapse wiped half a trillion dollars off the company’s value – back to the magic $1 trillion level – before Fed largesse ripped the company to $2 trillion in August 2020 (a double from the March 2020 lows). And now, Tim Cook sits atop the world’s largest company with a $3 trillion market cap…The iPhone maker’s share price has surged throughout 2021, leaving it up more than 200% since COVID...

More bad news for an already-crushed industry is making investors wonder how much more these companies can take. Stocks fell sharply as investors heard about a new COVID-19 variant. Cruise ship stocks took huge hits as a result. Investors have to hope that travel-hungry passengers will have the opportunity to sail in 2022 and beyond. Black Friday might not have created the same level of stock market discomfort that prompted the naming of Black Tuesday in 1929 or Black Monday in 1987, but stocks were nonetheless under pressure on the day after Thanksgiving. As of 10 a.m. ET on the...

President Biden's climate envoy former Secretary of State John Kerry dismissed a question about whether he was concerned that a Chinese company in which he holds a million dollar stake is using slave labor to build solar panels, saying "that's not in my lane." "Look, I don't know every detail about how the solar panels are made, but the fact that the product is solar panels puts it on the right side of the climate crisis," Kerry argued. "It's fossil fuels that are destroying the climate. Anything that can help avert this is worthy of pursuing regardless of the particular...

It’s no secret that pandemic-related government policy is driving at least some of the inflation currently being experienced in the United States. Indeed, real disposable income per capita has deviated from a linear trend in a meaningful way since 2020. The recent “breakout” in real disposable income was on top of the (much smaller) juicing provided by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2018, so it’s fair to say households have been feeling flush for some time now. As we will get to shortly, flush households mean more consumer spending. More consumer spending drives prices higher, especially when supply...

The chaotic moves in various energy markets around the world have spread to the metals markets with copper inventories available on the LME plunging to the lowest on record (since 1974), in a dramatic escalation of a squeeze on global supplies that sent spreads spiking and helped drive prices back above $10,000 a ton. Copper tracked by LME warehouses that’s not already earmarked for withdrawal has plunged 89% this month after a surge in orders for metal from warehouses in Europe.As Bloomberg reports, the last time that type of dynamic developed was during a historic squeeze in 2006, when a...

Despite recent hedge fund disasters and almost every economic indicator pointing to a potential stock crash, Biden’s administration has completely ignored a potential equities bubble.Since March 2020, $5.9 trillion in so-called relief spending authorized by Congress, as well as $3.3 trillion in quantitative easing from the Federal Reserve, has been pumped into the U.S. economy. America’s pandemic response resulted in 22 million jobs lost in a matter of months, and we still have 10 million fewer jobs than before March of last year. The fiscal and economic repercussions of going from stronger than expected job and wage growth in January...