Michael Ballanger
Articles by Michael Ballanger
If I had a dime last week for every podcaster/market guru/tea-leaf-reader that used the term “trapped” in describing the Fed’s current predicament, I would be a great deal more liquid than I am today. It seems that every time that a...
Anyone familiar with navigating the Great Lakes by either sail or by piston knows the value of a barometer and by default the peril of failing to heed one. The word itself is well-known to market historians through phrases like “the stock...
Tooth for tooth, eye for an eyeSell your soul just to buy, buy, buyBeggin' a dollar, stealin' a dimeCome on, can't you see that II am strandedCaught in the crossfireI am strandedCaught in the crossfire(Stevie Ray Vaughan)The last two...
“I went down to the crossroads tried to flag a rideDown to the crossroads tried to flag a rideNobody seemed to know me, everybody passed me by…”(American Delta Blues Master Robert Johnson 1936)I have been publishing annual forecasts since...
In 1983, I was offered the opportunity to attend a three-year course in “Stocks and Bonds 101” courtesy of the Securities Industry Association and with little or no appreciation of who or what that course might actually do for me, I...
Way back in 1921, a heretofore unknown Swiss psychologist by the name of Hermann Rorschach developed a test to examine the human mind in a manner which could be thought of as “a psychometric examination of pareidolia, the active...
“Storm’d at with shot and shell,While horse and hero fell,They that had fought so wellCame thro’ the jaws of Death,Back from the mouth of Hell”(“The Charge of the Light Brigade” – Sir Alfred Lord Tennyson)In case you had not yet noticed,...
Many years ago, when I was a rookie in the slash-and-burn wars of the 1970’s Canadian investment industry, I befriended a man that would turn out to have an entire chapter written about him in Peter C. Newman’s best-selling book about the...
“Murder most foul, as in the best it is, but this most foul, strange, and unnatural.” (Hamlet Act I, Scene V / William Shakespeare)Anyone schooled in the Canadian educational system in the 1960’s is by default familiar with William...
How quickly we forget.In each of the last five bear markets since the 1970s, I have etched into my neural storage unit memories as strong and clear as if they happened yesterday. Each one of those nasty declines were accompanied with...
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