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Yesterday, investment manager Elliott Management Corp. sent a letter to Marathon Petroleum (MPC), the nation’s largest energy refiner, seeking changes that could potentially increase the MPC share price.

Novo Nordisk (NVO) helped revolutionize weight-loss drugs, yet the stock has lost 60% from its all-time highs. Is now the time to step in and buy?

I get questions quite often about how I use stops. Some traders have hard and fast rules such as “If I’m down 25% (or 50% or whatever) on a position I exit immediately.” I really don’t have such rules.

The market will be closed on Monday in celebration of Labor Day, so if the market does not make a big move tomorrow, the price of options will get hit extremely hard. Why do options lose significant amounts of value ahead of a long weekend?

I get questions quite often about how I use stops. Some traders have hard and fast rules such as “If I’m down 25% (or 50% or whatever) on a position I exit immediately.” I really don’t have such rules.

We’re going to continue with our strategy of taking relatively quick, modest gains on slower-growth names while holding on to our faster, more aggressive positions in hopes of larger gains.

Yesterday brought widespread carnage to the markets, which has carried on to today, but some tech stocks have found support. For now we are going to be watching and waiting, but I want to comment on three current holdings.

Finding the best-looking stocks in a bad market is a great way to identify stocks that can outperform when the market heads higher. These three are all on my watchlist.

Cannabis is the rare industry where sector-moving catalysts can seemingly come out of nowhere, here are 4 that we’re watching closely.

In a bad market, good stocks stand out like a sore thumb, and these three stocks all look solid coming out of April’s market meltdown.

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are on pace for their strongest year since 2021, but will that uptick in activity be bullish for small-cap stocks?

Uh oh. The rally is in trouble.

The market sort of wobbled into January after a rough December. It started good but things turned a little ugly last week after a better-than-expected jobs report and worries about sticky inflation.

Welcome to the post-Labor Day market. A sobered-up investor can be an ornery investor.

Stocks kicked off the first trading day after Labor Day on a decidedly negative note. The August manufacturing number was still somewhat weak, but all eyes are on the August jobs number that comes out Friday. It was the weak July jobs number that prompted recession fears and the market selloff in early August. Another bad number could reignite recession worries that had faded in the second part of August.

Wow. Just wow. Not only has this market rally continued to forge on, it’s broadened out too. After a 14.5% gain in the first half of this year, the S&P is putting together an impressive July with a better than 3% gain so far.

The latest leg of this rally has been sparked by a better-than-expected June CPI report. Interest rate optimism abounds. Consensus now expects a Fed rate cut before the end of the year and an increased expectation that overall interest rates have peaked and are likely to trend lower for the rest of the year.

It’s one thing after another. But stocks keep inching higher.

January featured the interest rate scare, as the ten-year Treasury hit the highest level since 2023, and the DeepSeek news, which called AI spending into question and sent related stocks reeling. Yet the S&P 500 finished the month up 2.7% with 10 of the 11 sectors higher for January. This week features more potential market-moving issues.

The holiday-shortened week yielded more gains for the leading indexes as traders ready themselves for the close of 2024. Here is how our positions performed last week.

WHAT TO DO NOW: While a couple handfuls of mega-cap stocks act well, we continue to see more stocks hit air pockets than get going on the upside, which, combined with our mixed market timing indicators, has us staying relatively close to shore. Today we’re going to sell one-third of our stake in Cava (CAVA)—like so many names, the stock has been unable to break through resistance, and now it (and its peer group) has come under heavy selling pressure. Our cash position will now be just over 40%.

It’s required patience to live with the ups and downs of owning Enovix (ENVX) for as long as we have. And the timeline here serves as another reminder that building a company to bring a new product to market is no small feat. In this case, the launch of high-volume sales keeps getting pushed out, which also pushes out performance of the stock. But we’re sticking with ENVX because those better days should still arrive. And when they do, I think the stock can capture investors’ imagination and push it to levels that will seem, at times, totally ridiculous. We have seen that time and time again with these types of stocks.

“Tim, Thank you for finding Tesla stock when it was relatively unknown—that’s what allowed me to buy my Model X.”
R. Kieft, Anchorage, Alaska

My father gave me simple advice on how to find the best stocks to buy in any market. Here are five of the best stocks to buy in today’s market.