We really need to look at total employment and the total increase or decrease in wages in the US. The unemployment report doesn't cut it these days. Growth has certainly leveled off as we are seeing now.

Usually that is the case. However if debt becomes to enormous then inflation could cause bond payments to exceed tax increases when inflation rises. Certainly a government that cuts taxes and has massive debts might not want rates to rise because the tax increases may not offset the interest rate payments.

They want low inflation because countries are running massive deficits and the central banks have a tremendous amount of debt to keep floating.

Last I heard Canada was looking for laws to staunch the flows of overseas money going into investing into its real estate. Although higher prices are good for sellers, having your housing eaten up for investing creates a whole new mess of problems. Housing still needs to be primarily for people to live in. This is an important but strangely overlooked issue these days.

At least the economy is stable for quite a while. The weakness is not all America's fault but QE and zirp doesn't help. Although it lifts boat up it prevents strong growth. A big problem is global growth which is weak and the trade wars don't help. If everyone starts putting up trade barriers and tariffs we easily could do a lot worse than where we are.

In the meantime enjoy the small flowers from a mild economy and don't look for strong growth anytime soon.

Don't you mean a triangle consolidation pattern? After the consolidation it may run up as a summer rally may occur. Then who knows what will happen.

The big worry over Apple is that it is losing its cell phone marketshare in Asia and that has always tended to spell bad news for the rest of the World sooner or later. Look at what happened to Motorola and Nokia for instance. However, it's not as bad as it looks. Some of it is artificial cause by Trumps trade war. And some of it is pricing that Apple has not addressed. Simply put, the market is more competitive with competing products and lower component costs yet Apple keeps pricing high. You can argue brand value but when it's expensive in the US it's not really affordable in China and other emerging countries.

I think this has been heavily considered in the low PE Apple trades for. However, as discounting in expectation and reality sets in I wouldn't want to play it. I'd rather wait until Apple takes the leap and discounts their handsets to pull their pricing into line with the rest of the handset market. That said, Apple is not a dead stock and certainly is not worth selling for huge capital gains tax here. It is a waiting game more than a sell as bears would tell you. I don't expect a big Apple run up in the next year unless the whole market runs. Then it doesn't matter. It will be a function of "are you in the market or not?"

The market's selloff Friday was good. The market needs to not get too far ahead of itself. What really needs to be done is to end the global trade wars which is hurting the US, China, Europe, etc. Strangely it is affecting the US the least but the fear is that it may affect the US long term.

Those reporting bad earnings tend to come in early so I'm not that surprised yet. That said, unless analysts lowered their earnings expectations, weakening growth prospects will result in under performance until the expectations fall into line again.

Value investing is not dead, but one must take growth prospects into mind. Likewise, quite the contrary, many old value stocks are so popular their prices no longer sport "value" in their price. Thus the argument is better stated, now that value investing has become mainstream is there any real hidden pockets of "value" left? There are, but they are increasingly hard to find and usually revolve around undervalued growth more than undiscovered value.

Remember buffet had this problem before finding good value chasing down people who 's significant others died with a business to rip them off. That's why he got into insurance in the first place. Value investing can be hard. It is getting very hard again because too many people know how to do the basics.