by Jeff Miller

When nearly everything you see or read seems to carry the same message, it is time to take a deeper look. The mainstream thought now seems to include an obligatory nod to the "mess in Europe" featuring their clueless leaders, the fiscal cliff, the recessionary US economy, and the upcoming hard landing in China.

Wow! It does not take much to convince the punditry that investors should all step aside until after the election.

Read more »

Written by Trefis Staff

Below is a summary of the activity at Trefis during the past week that Trefis thought Econintersect readers would find interesting.

Trefis is a financial community structured around trends, forecasts and insights related to some of the most popular stocks in the US. It provides the unique feature of allowing the user to model future valuation based upon projected changes in components of each business. It also provides communication capabilities among members, including consensus of member analysis compared to Trefis staff analysis and blogging opportunities for members.

Click on graphic for larger image and go to Trefis interactive page.

Click "Read more..." to see our new clickable table of contents and most covered companies of the week.

Read more »

Written by John Lounsbury

With all the ups and downs in markets in May and June and the growing pessimism among investors, it is a good time to revisit the Econintersect 30, the global market indexes that are followed by Global Economic Intersection.  We will also revisit the last bull market review that was published on 9 April 2012 because the bull market for many indexes continued past that date.

In spite of the difficulties that have plagued global economies in recent months, only three of the markets followed are in official primary bear territory (down 20% or more), while 20 are in correction (secondary bear markets down 10% or more but less than 20%) and seven are in pullbacks of less than 10%.  The latest bear market table follows the Read more break, along with an update of the bull market table.

Read more »

Article of the Week from Investing Daily

by Roger Conrad

All eyes are on Europe’s economic and political crisis these days. And no matter how Greece’s vote goes on Sunday, the Continent’s woes are unlikely to lessen any time soon, as attention turns to fiscal problems in Spain, Italy and elsewhere.

Ironically, emerging Asia, particularly China, is far more important for many income investors. And happily, the outlook there is considerably more optimistic.

When the US real estate bubble burst and triggered a systemic global economic crisis in 2008, it was China that helped stabilize the world economy. The Middle Kingdom’s demand for natural resources kept Australia out of recession altogether. Meanwhile, Canada had only a mild downturn, and even the US was able to return to growth by mid-2009.

Read more »

Written by Mark Bern, CPA CFA

This week I continued the new series of articles discussing my Master List and the selection process I use to identify quality companies.You are welcome to jump into the series at any place or any time as each articles is written to stand well and make sense on its own, but you also may find it helpful to read the first article in the series, “The Dividend Investors’ Guide to Successful Investing,” which includes a detailed outline of the process of filtering and eliminating companies to narrow the list down to a manageable level.It includes a discussion of each of my ten rules that I apply to rate each company that makes it through the full screening process.

Read more »