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The Weekend Update is Now Available

On May 5, 2013, in Iacono Research, by Tim

The latest issue of the Iacono Research Weekend Update has been posted to the website and is now available for subscribers here. There are no changes to either the model portfolio or the buy ratings this week, but recent covered call sales and financial market developments are covered in the following discussion topics:

The executive summary is as follows:

A better-than-expected labor report offered renewed hope for the U.S. economy, however, the recession in Europe appears to be worsening and there were fresh signs of slowing growth in China. The European Central Bank cut short-term interest rates and the Federal Reserve promised to keep its monetary stimulus in place, all of which was greeted warmly by U.S. investors who pushed equity markets to record highs.

The natural resource sector saw sharply higher prices paced by big gains for corn, wheat, and many industrial metals, all of which continue to rebound from their April sell-offs. Precious metals saw modest improvements along with beleaguered mining stocks while both energy stocks and REITs moved higher. For the week, the model portfolio rose 0.7 percent and is now down 13.5 percent for the year.

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Back to the Future!

On April 1, 2013, in Personal, by Tim

I watched that trilogy not long ago. It’s funny what they thought it would be like around this time – they overshot on transportation but underestimated the advances in cell phones…

Anyway, you may have been directed here from the Iacono Research website that is now back to being just an investment website after a nice makeover (as shown below) from its last appearance as such. All daily musings about what’s right and what’s wrong in the world will again be appearing at this blog and just the subscription service will be available there.

I guess this really is a case of back to the future because, as shown above, this wasn’t supposed to happen until tomorrow (I don’t know why they say it will take 12 to 24 hours for DNS changes to propagate through the system – it was almost instantaneous for me).

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More About the New Blog/Website

On March 20, 2012, in Personal, by Tim

As you’ve no doubt noticed by now, there’s not much happening here at this blog as the regular daily fare has moved over to the new www.iaconoresearch.com. I expect that to be the case for the foreseeable future, though I’m not quite sure what will become of this blog.

Why the change?

It’s been almost two years at this blog after five years at the old blogspot blog – the original Mess That Greenspan Made – and I’d probably have just kept doing what I was doing with this blog and the separate investment website except that an opportunity arose for a partnership with InvestingChannel that I just couldn’t turn down.

Basically, InvestingChannel has done all the website development and now hosts the new combined blog/investment website (I probably should have combined the two when I started back in 2005) while also handling all the marketing and sales for the subscription product.

As you may know, marketing and sales isn’t exactly my forte, so, I was more than happy to let them do that and share the revenue. I’ve come to learn over the years that the investment newsletter business is really more about marketing and sales than content and, since I was never very good at the former, I’m happy to just provide the latter.

For those of you who don’t know, a lot of effort goes into the investment newsletter (published weekly) and the performance of the model portfolio going all the way back to early-2005 is quite good (up over 100 percent since that time) , but I’ve just never done much to promote it and have never advertised.

That’s what InvestingChannel will be doing and, now that the development work is done, I’m looking forward to seeing how that all works out.

I’m not quite sure what to do with this blog. My original thought was to make it more of a personal blog and have the new Iacono Research be strictly about economics/investments/finance/money printing. Then, anything else that I felt like sharing could go here. I’m not sure how much more I have to share, so, we’ll just have to see how that works out.

As for the name, I attempted to change The Mess That Greenspan Made to simply timiacono.com, however, the Wordpress Gods did not allow that (I enter the change, but it never shows up at the blog), so, I’m taking that as a sign that I should just leave it alone, at least for the time being.

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Meet the New Blog/Website

On March 19, 2012, in Personal, by Tim

There will be more details on this sometime later in the day tomorrow, but, this morning, in a new partnership with InvestingChannel, I’m officially switching over to the new combined financial blog/investment website located at www.iaconoresearch.com:

I’ve been double-posting everything here for a few weeks now and that all ends today. I’m not sure what, exactly, will become of the blog you are now reading, but, like the original one – The Mess That Greenspan Made at Blogger – it won’t be going away anytime soon (I still like that old tag line: “How Eighteen Years of Easy Money Changed the World”).

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Why This Isn’t Your Father’s Gold Market

On February 27, 2012, in Commodities, by Tim

[Following are excerpts from the current issue of the Weekend Update at Iacono Research. By the way, the new combined investment website/blog will launch in the next week or so and, as part of that process, subscription rates will be going up considerably, so, if you're thinking of subscribing, sooner would be better than later - the link is here.]

Gold and silver prices picked up where they left off in January, surging again after a three week pause on optimism that a messy debt default in Greece will be avoided, heightened tension in the Middle East, and a weaker trade-weighted dollar as bullish technical factors triggered hedge fund buying, most analysts now predicting even higher prices ahead.

For the week, the gold price surged nearly $50 an ounce (or 2.9 percent), from $1,723.80 an ounce to $1,773.60, and the silver price jumped 6.4 percent, from $33.28 an ounce to $35.41. Gold is now up 13.2 percent for the year, but down 7.7 percent from its high last year, and the silver price has gained 27.1 percent so far in 2012, now down 28.4 percent from its peak last spring.

Silver reached a five-month high at $35.70 an ounce on Friday after piercing through its 200-day moving average the day before (as indicated in red in the one-year silver chart below) and, while some analysts think it is now vulnerable to profit taking, others think this sets the stage for another assault on the $40 an ounce level, last seen in early-September prior to the vicious sell-off that affected nearly all asset classes.

[To continue reading this story, please visit Seeking Alpha.]

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Hedge Funds Bounce Back in 2012

On February 7, 2012, in Stocks, by Tim

Reuters reports that it’s been a good first month of the year for hedge funds as last year’s losers are turning into this year’s winners following the reversal of the late-2011 decline in early-2012. Even John Paulson seems to be doing well lately, his Advantage Plus Fund already up 5 percent this year after tumbling more than 50 percent last year.

This graphic from the Economist’s Daily Chart depicts how trying it’s been recently, particularly last year when many investors were probably wondering why they were paying big fees to hedge fund managers who underperformed a low cost stock index fund.

Interestingly, according to the Reuters story, after plunging 42 percent last year, the $116 million Henderson European Absolute Return fund claims the top spot in performance this year with a gain of 14 percent through late-January. This compares to a gain of almost 12 percent for the Iacono Research model portfolio so far in 2012 after a decline of 5 percent last year, the same as the average hedge fund performance in 2011.

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