A year ago, we had pointed out that despite May’s reputation as being a time to sell equities, the prior four years produced positive returns in all three equity indexes in May. Make that five years in a row now. Though, when you take a closer look at recent equity performance in May, each year there has been some volatility in the markets during May and the overall gains have been only marginal.

Distributed ledger technology is a cryptographically encoded, highly detailed ledger of transactions, distributed across a public or private network that promises substantial benefits of transaction speed and security, process efficiencies and cost savings.

An exchange start-up threatens to revolutionize the way futures are traded, margined and cleared. Here is their story.

Financial technology has been driving markets for decades. Often when we talk about fintech it is about some new technology that promises to disrupt the current market model. But today’s disruptive technology can be tomorrow’s trading infrastructure.

Weening a country, or market, off easy money is tricky, even when it’s done slowly, as the Federal Reserve is doing. The removal of monetary accommodation is not made any easier by protectionist threats and counter threats that complicate the macroeconomic mix, roil markets and tighten financial conditions.

Quant Cycles is a technical tool that employs proprietary statistical techniques and complex algorithms to filter multiple cycles from historical data, combines them to obtain cyclical information from price data and then gives a graphical representation of their productive behavior. Other proprietary frequency domain techniques then are employed to obtain the cycles embedded in the price.

Cryptocurrencies are growing exponentially in their number and value. It is time to examine price and hunt for opportunities. ​

Cotton prices have been trending higher, which has driven up call premiums, but a top may be in sight.

Weather players have had a field day with prices this winter, driving up option premiums. With seasonal fundamentals now set to kick in, the table looks set for put writers.

A look at long-term trends of commercial interest in the CFTC’s “Commitments of Traders” report.

Spin-offs provide fertile ground for a variety of investment disciplines. Growth opportunities arise when a mature company divests a subsidiary whose prospects have been masked by the slow growth of the parent. Value investors benefit when the price of a seasoned business — new to the public market — is beat down to attractive levels due to indiscriminate selling.

While many fintech firms are swimming firmly upstream, Broadridge Financial Solutions is up 16% year-to-date and 54% duing the last 12-month period with a dividend yield of 1.4%. Earnings have been mixed, splitting positive and negative quarters over the last year.

Massachusetts-based Biogen Inc., founded in 1978, focuses globally on the research, development and manufacturing of products to combat various neurological and neurodegenerative diseases.

Noble Energy (NBL) is a relatively small independent global oil and gas exploration and production producer with a market cap of $15 billion. Asset sales since 2010 generated proceeds of $6.8 billion.

Occidental Petroleum ranks among the largest independent oil producers with a market cap of $50 billion, and it sells at a premium multiple in its peer group. Our target for OXY stock is $89 per share, a 37% increase from current prices, based on a $60 per barrel WTI oil price in 2018 and its seven-year average 10.6x cash flow multiple on 2018 estimated cash flow of $8.41 per share.

With a market cap of $217 billion, Chevron competes with the likes of Exxon (XOM), Shell, BP and Total. CVX consistently ranks among the lowest cost producers in its nine-company peer group. Strong production growth is anticipated in 2018 and 2019.

ITG Investment Technology Group has been a laggard in a sector that is now spiraling lower — not a good combination. ITG is an investment play that is unchanged year-to-date and 3% lower during the last 12-month period. It sports a dividend yield of 1.4%. Earnings momentum has been waning with three straight losing quarters: 1.3%, 14.7% and 3.6% respectively.

Saudi Arabia is focused on reducing surplus oil inventories, and the extension of production cuts along with growing global demand is helping.

Bob Moss had not even turned 21 when he began trading on the MidAmerica Exchange, and it wasn’t his first career choice. Moss was taking pre-med classes at Knox College but secretly wanted to be a professional race car driver.

Picking winners in major league baseball in the era of extended playoffs can be difficult. Most handicappers have a good idea who the best teams will be, and if you fall into that category, it doesn’t necessarily matter if you win your division or enter as a wildcard.

Many people check their horoscopes in the morning, but do you check your market’s horoscope? One woman does and has written a book about it.

As any Economics 101 student learns, the Federal Reserve is responsible for U.S. monetary policy, including setting the level of interest rates, and more recently, managing the central bank’s vast assets acquired through repeated iterations of Quantitative Easing.

The ratio calendar combination spread couples two ratio calendar spreads, one using calls and the other using puts. The call strike prices are higher than the put strike prices. This strategy is complex and profit is limited, but if a high amount of time value is involved in the short positions, that profit can be substantial and risk is still limited.

Have you ever heard about the Dow Jones Transportation Average? It is more loosely termed the “Dow Jones Transports” by stock traders. The index is a running average of the stock prices of 20 transportation corporations.

One of the hottest subsets of the fintech landscape these days, and for good reason, is alternative data providers. Quantitative investment funds, which continue to outperform their discretionary peers, are in an all-out frenzy to feed their algorithms with as much valuable data as possible to find market signals

Financial Technology (Fintech) refers to the technologies used and applied in the financial services sector. During the last decade, due to technological innovations, fintech firms are disrupting traditional financial services sectors in retail banking, investment, mobile payments, loans, fund-raising and asset management. Fintech is also changing customer behavior and expectations as they are now able to access data and information anywhere and everywhere.

There are many kinds of options in the trading world. Vanilla options are the most common types of option contracts known to investors on the market. There are two kinds of vanilla options: European and American style options. European options are the most simple and basic form of option contracts used by equity market players.

E.S.C. Coppock introduced the indicator in Barron’s in October 1965. The goal of this indicator is to identify long-term buying opportunities in the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Index. The signal is very simple. Coppock used monthly data to identify buying opportunities when the indicator moved from negative territory to positive territory.