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We had four companies report earnings this week and I’ve already updated you on three of them through Special Bulletins. A review of the fourth, as well as incremental updates on our other positions, is provided in today’s Update. Overall, my stance is still cautiously optimistic.

The stock market’s strong and resilient upward march this year to a 32% total return was great. Yet, few, including us, expected such an uplifting outcome in 2019.

In this issue, we give our turnaround market outlook for 2020.

This is a very important week that should determine the near-term direction of the market.


While the market digests the JPMorgan (JPM) buyout of First Republic Bank (FRC), the largest bank failure since the financial crisis, it looks ahead to a packed week. There’s a Fed meeting on Wednesday, where the Central Bank is widely expected to raise the Fed Funds rate by 0.25%. But the Chairman’s comments afterward will probably have a bigger impact on the market.

Last week marked the fourth straight week of declines for the S&P 500 and was the worst week so far this year, down nearly 3%.

The problem is inflation, go figure. The Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of inflation, the Personal Expenditures Price Index (PCE), was much higher than expected in January and showed inflation moving higher, not lower, to start the year.

Price per share may change the number of shares of a company that you buy, but does it change your potential for generating profit?

Buying this Dividend Aristocrats ETF is a way to own the 65 best dividend growth stocks on the market. But there are other alternatives too.

Alibaba stock has been one of the market’s high risers. But its greater potential lies ahead, and cloud computing will play a big role in its future growth.

Although the market remains volatile, the action in the major indexes improved this week. The S&P 500, for example, bounced off its 200-day moving average again Friday, its third time retesting that level and finding support since the start of the year. As a result, I have three rating changes today including one sell.

This was an interesting week with news ranging from inflation to AI, tech struggles between the U.S. and China, and Tesla’s edge in terms of labor costs.

On Capitol Hill in Washington, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates and others worth an estimated $500 billion, according to Forbes, met for a closed-door Senate summit on AI.

Consumer prices rose 0.6% in August, the largest increase since June of 2022. An 11% jump in gasoline prices was the main problem, which led to a fall in average real earnings.

The market is in nowheresville. The S&P 500 is at the same level it was in early April. But the index isn’t really down. It’s only 1% below the all-time high. It’s not that the market is going down. It just stopped going up.

We are just weeks into a year that has so far been better and different than last year.

The S&P 500 is up 4.7% in January after falling 19.4% in 2022. The winners and losers are also different. The best performing sectors are last year’s worst performing, technology and consumer staples. The worst performing sectors are last year’s best performers (with the exception of energy): healthcare, utilities and consumer staples.

Is this a portent of things to come or just a temporary reallocation?

If you’ve been reading our Wealth Advisories for a while, you probably know that I’m big on maxims.

Tesla Motors (TSLA) has been one of the hottest stocks in the market, zooming to a gain of 206% over the past 10 weeks.

Learning how to understand stock charts can be an incredibly useful tool for identifying both sentiment and institutional buying patterns.

For long-term investors, now is a great time to look for high-quality investments that have been dragged down—ideally over a period of several months, so most of the sellers have already bailed—and are now starting to turn around. I recently ran a simple screen for dividend-paying stocks that match my selection criteria. Here are three of them.

SELL: AVTR and TIXT. Moving to HOLD: APP

With the short holiday week and only three trading days since last week’s update, we will go directly to a new recommendation. Markets welcomed the nomination of Jerome Powell as head of the Fed for another term, believing that he will keep interest rates low through early next year. As for our stocks, Cloudflare (NET) had a down day yesterday but we have no change in recommendation.

Have a great Thanksgiving holiday.

Looking for an investment that offers steady income? Look no further than REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts) for a win.