Are you sold on gold? The precious metal outperformed every major equity index in the world in 2008. The question is, can gold—and other precious metals—keep on flying? Or would buying today be buying high and selling low?

Precious metals have always been intriguing to investors because they tend to hold their value. In times of geopolitical crisis or currency devaluation, for example, the value of paper money might fluctuate, but a hard asset will always be worth something. As a result, historically, precious metals have been considered a “safe haven” in times of economic and financial instability.

That brings us to why gold is on a tear today. It declined in 2008 and early 2009 as panicked investors rushed into cash in an attempt to weather the financial crisis. But sometime in the middle on 2009, when investors began to move their money from the sidelines, gold started to rally.

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GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Denmark-based Genmab received some good news with the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval for Arzerra (ofatumumab), a monoclonal antibody for patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), a slowly progressing cancer of the blood and bone marrow.  Arzerra is approved for cancer patients who are no longer responding to the current available treatment options using fludarabine and alemtuzumab. Following the approval, Genmab has become eligible to receive a milestone payment of DKK 116 million (approximately $23 million) from Glaxo.  Earlier, in May 2009, Arzerra had received a positive recommendation from the FDA's Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee (ODAC) in which the panel had voted 10-3 in favor of the drug. They had found that Arzerra provided some clinical benefit to patients with CLL whose disease was refractory to fludarabine and alemtuzumab.  Arzerra has been approved by the FDA under the accelerated approval process ...

From eight o'clock in the morning I was looking in the window: from it, like in the palm of your hand, you can see school № 1965, which on October 11th was transformed into a polling station. Right until evening I did not uncover a single burst of massness: the people went, but somehow limply, one by one... At 10:30 in the barbershop I asked: speak up, who has already voted. The 10 or so people, including the barbers, were silent. «Why didn't you go?» - I asked a man of middle years. «Fuck it», - said he simply and comprehensibly. 66% victorious unirussians [candidates from United Russia, the "party of power"--Trans.] ...

In our last post we discussed how we at The Macro Trader think that risk is vastly under-priced.  We looked at several different volatility indexes as well as Bill Luby and VixandMore.com’s JunkDEX.  The JunkDEX shows how well stocks like AIG, FNM, C, CIT, and BAC are doing.  As you can see in our previous post “Volatility Indexes, Risk Appetite, Mispriced Risk, And Where We Think We Are Headed” the JunkDEX  has had a monster rally.  Usually this would signal at least a short term top as speculative fever burns out.   Obviously the rally was not done and we are up since then.

To more quantitatively show the huge run up in risky assets we went looking for some factor based indexes that would show the performance of “good” and “bad” companies.  In our search we came across some custom stock baskets from Goldman Sachs that use Edward

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The first public retirement pension scheme was created by Otto von Bismarck in 1880 Germany. Fifty years later, during the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt followed suit in the United States. As we’ve seen, the number of people expected to reach the retirement age of 65 was not considered to pose a threat to future funding.

Life expectancy in 1935, in the United States, for example, was 76.9 for men. Workers relying on the plan for retirement would not receive much each month and were not expected to live long enough to drain the system.

When Social Security was founded, the typical US worker at age 65 could expect to live another 11.9 years. But if today’s official projections are right, by the year 2040 the typical 65-year-old worker can expect to live at least another 19.2 years. If the normal retirement age had been indexed to longevity since 1935,

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You could look at market cycles narrowly – just by keeping your eye on price movements. Or you can look at the Big Picture… all the connections between markets and the rest of the world… in the hopes of understanding what is BEHIND the price movements and where it might take them.

Friday, the Dow dropped 76 points. It’s probably going down soon… but maybe not yet. The Dow would have to rise to about 10,350 to equal the ’29 bounce. And heck, it’s not September yet. September is traditionally the worst month for investors… followed by October, November, December, January, February, March, April, May, June, July and August.

But what’s this? The morning news: Chinese stocks suffered their worst day since November – with the Shanghai index down 6%.

The rally is probably not over; still we wouldn’t want to be long when the market opens in New York this morning.

Many

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Wall Street “gurus” come and go, but in the case of Bob Farrell legendary status was achieved. He spent several decades as chief stock market analyst at Merrill Lynch & Co. and had a front-row seat at the go-go markets of the late 1960s, mid-1980s and late 1990s, the brutal bear market of 1973-74, and October 1987 crash.

Farrell retired in 1992, but his famous “10 Market Rules to Remember” have lived on and are summarized below, courtesy of The Big Picture and MarketWatch (June 2008). The words of wisdom are timeless and are especially appropriate as investors grapple with the difficult juncture at which stock markets find themselves at this stage.

1. Markets tend to return to the mean over time When stocks go too far in one direction, they come back. Euphoria and pessimism can cloud people’s heads. It’s easy to get caught

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On July 24, New York-based biopharmaceutical company Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. (REGN) announced that its once-weekly injection Arcalyst (Rilonacept) received a positive response from the Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) of the European Medicines Agency (EMEA). The drug is used for treating Cryopyrin-Associated Periodic Syndromes (CAPS), a group of rare, inherited, auto-inflammatory conditions characterized by life-long, recurrent symptoms of rash, fever/chills, joint pain, eye redness/pain, and fatigue.

CHMP has recommended that rilonacept, an interleukin-1 blocker, be granted marketing authorization under exceptional circumstances. Such authorizations are granted to products on which comprehensive data cannot be provided by the company, which may happen due to the the rarity of the condition. The agency also asked Regeneron to  provide new information, if available, pertaining to the drug every year for review.

The company submitted a Marketing Authorization Application (MAA) with the EMEA for Arcalyst for the treatment of CAPS in the European

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Today, I want to focus on specific markets that heat up during the summer thanks to the less-than-reliable nature of weather.

Since many of these commodities are real physical products that we use for consumption purposes, it’s no surprise that these markets rise in price whenever investors suspect an oncoming deficit.

Specifically, grains and other foodstuffs are at the mercy of Mother Nature from the time they are being planted until they can be brought to market. Right now is one of those critical periods, and with that in mind, we’re going to discuss the sectors that are most volatile during these summer months.

Get Going With The Grains

Applied to the commodities market, “the grains,” consist of corn, wheat and soybean futures and options contracts. We see the most speculative interest in these markets from all kinds of participants as what happens often happens fast, with big rewards for those people who know

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Remember when we were in a “State of Shock” after hearing the news of Michael Jackson’s death?

That quickly turned to mania, as the media went nuts over it and fans clamored to pay their respects by buying tons of Michael Jackson merchandise. And MJ fever shows no signs of being ready to “Beat It.”

As demand for all things Michael has spiked, there’s are no doubt that many suppliers are willing to meet it. From vendors outside the Staples Center selling cheesy souvenirs, to multi-billlion dollar corporations, there are several beneficiaries of massive spending on Jackson’s music and memorabilia.

While I’m not suggesting you should unscrupulously profit from his demise, it’s a fact that some companies are enjoying a boom in Michael Jackson-related business. Here are four of them…

Four Companies At The Center Of The Michael Jackson Story

eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY): As soon as tickets to the memorial were released, ...