Investor's Edge with Gary Kaltbaum - Markets Closed [Presidents Day 02.17.2025]

Episode Date: February 17, 2025

https://garykaltbaum.com/

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That's Tommyjohn.com, code comfort. Tommy John. Comfort perfected. Never show any sign of weakness. Always go for the throat. Buy low, sell high. Fear, that's the other guy's problem. Biz Talk Radio is proud to bring you. Esther's Edge with Gary Colpom.

Straight talk about you and your money. You can reach Gary now at 877-747 Edge. That's 877-7-47-347.33. Here is your host. Gary Call-Cull. And welcome once again to Investors Edge. I'm Gary Kalkb. I'm your host. Hey, thanks for being with us today.

Glad you are here, ladies and gentlemen. Always happy that you are listening. You know, we've been getting a lot of emails from people. Gary, you're playing the same holiday shows. You're playing the same shows when you happen to be maybe trapped. that you've been playing for a couple of years. Can you do us some justice and put together some other shows when you are traveling or when it's a holiday? Well, I've listened to you.

I have heard you. And today is one of those shows. We have put together topics. that we think are quite topical at this moment in time. We're not putting a date on today's show, but you'll get the gist. Today on the show, we're going to be covering central banks. And why they are so much more important now than they have been in the past, then we'll be talking bubbles.

and what they look like, how they feel, why they occur, and how they end. We're going to talk about earnings and the importance of gaps when companies report earnings, gaps both up and down. Other things we'll be discussing today in the markets, sectors, cousin stocks, what's a cousin stock? We'll explain. And a little bit on relative strength, because ladies and gentlemen, we think there are just too many definitions out there

on what relative strength is in the markets. We will strip away all the myths and explain. So again, we thank you for being here on this day. It's either a holiday or we are out. And where do I want to start today? And it's something we've talked about a lot. We never really used to have to talk about it. Many years ago, central banks, their job was simplistic.

Meet every month and not do much. Seriously. Many years ago, there were no central bank people talking in between meetings. It was frowned upon. And then came the mid-90s. For some reason, they decided they needed to be famous. They needed to be out there. All well and good, but something else happened.

See, back in the late 90s, there was a gentleman by the name of Alan Greenspan, who believed in easy money policies, and at that time, all it meant was lowering interest rates. keeping them down, but not to zero percent. I still remember when being easy was when they would take the Fed funds rate down from 4% to 3 and a quarter over a six-month period, and that was real easy. And then came Bernanke, and we watched how we went easy and easier. and in that time a bubble was created

one of the biggest bubbles in history that being the housing bubble and Mr. Bernanke didn't know it was coming didn't have an idea it was coming didn't see it coming when it came did not know it was here and not until everything blew up

did he acknowledge it and what did he do he did something we have not seen before. He immediately ramped down interest rates down to zero percent. Zero percent. Zero percent. Now, these interest rates are important.

Why? Because loans are based on it. Debt is based on it. And asset prices also work off of them. You ever heard the line? don't fight the Fed. When the Fed is easing, markets usually do better. But what happens when the Fed goes down to 0%.

Well, you saw what happened. Markets bottomed and started rallying. But something else then happened, something we never even dreamed of. I certainly never dreamed of it. Ben Bernanke decided, and they would not use the terminology. But we did. And that is they started printing money. Now, do they actually print money?

No, they press buttons and create money. And they took that money that was created out of thin air and bought up our government bonds. And the goal in mind was to get interest rates as far down as possible, not only on the short end, but on the long end. The thought process being, if interest rates come down the cost of capital to do everything and be everything, come down and that would spur on economic growth. But there's repercussions. A, savers get zero. Who gets the difference?

The banks. Fair? Well, we'll let you decide if that's fair. The other part of the equation is it kind of screws up the markets. You know, markets are supposed to be between buyers and sellers based on fear and greed. Desperation or inspiration. strength versus weakness and they interfered no longer was there was there a two-way trade they bought up everything in sight and thus interest rates came way down and fast forward into the 2014

to where the fed had printed four and a half trillion dollars four and a half trillion Not many can put their hands around that type of number. And that's on top of 0% interest rates. And markets reacted and reacted well. But along the way, every time the Fed stopped printing money, the markets corrected. And every time the markets corrected, the Fed did something new. You remember, QE1, QE2, Operation Twist. I'm still not sure what that was.

QE3, the mother of all printing of money, $85 billion a month. But what happened was they started to lose a lot of credibility and recognized we got to change a little bit. So they came off their printing of money, slowly but surely. And markets started to hang in there until markets started to get in trouble. And what did they do? they found some friends Japan

Europe China and in a coordinated effort in late 2014 Japan announced a trillion in change Europe announced the trillion in change and then China the supposed miracle of Asia

realized that they were heading south they started easing big time and guess what happened to their markets they soared they copied Ben Bernet Thank you, since markets soared here, they now soar over there, to the point where it doesn't matter what country it is. The communist paradise of Venezuela in early 2015 saw their stock market soaring even though inflation is 60, 70 percent there.

Thus the big, humongous central bank intervention. but the issue is what is it created we know easy money was in part created which led to 2000 to 2003 we know in big part easy money led to 2007

2008 and now we have I wouldn't even call it the mother of all easy money I would call it I don't even the universe of all easy money all easy money. Things we couldn't fathom around the globe, zero percent interest rates, $5 trillion of negative interest rates,

and $14 trillion of printing money, and still going strong. So what are the repercussions? What are the ultimate repercussions? Are there repercussions? We'll head right into that up next. Thank you for being here on this special day. I'm Gary.

This is the one and only investors' edge. It's time to switch on the integrator units. Get the brain cells working. You're listening to. Hey, this promise is to be fun. Investors Edge. The last bastion of quality programming. With Gary Coltbaum.

It doesn't get better than this. And welcome once again to Investors Edge on this special show today. It's either a holiday or we're caught up somewhere traveling in the outer parts of Mongolia or something like that. And as always, we are pleased to be with you. So we started off talking central banks and just realize when we save $14 trillion of money printed, that's going into the asset prices. It bubbles things up. The worry is what are the ultimate repercussions?

Because the real definitions of bubbles or the causes of bubbles are easy monetary policy combined with asset prices going up and then at a certain point in time, greed and the desperation of not being in overtakes things. Back in 99, it was in the Internet and tech space, and some big, big cap things. I still remember Walmart, GE, and a few others had 60 times earnings, even though they were growing at 10, 15% at the time.

And we all know what happened. And then we all know what happened in 2007, where in housing, true story, people would actually line up in a tent two days in advance for a supposed condo that was going to be built in Miami to plunk down a deposit and then put it up for sale as soon as they signed the document

and within a week would sell it and make $25 or $50,000. It worked for a while. But of course, once price and value, get too stretched, eventually things give, things cave. And we all know what happened at that point. So easy money met, greed, and desperation. And now we get to the point where we've seen markets, no bear markets for many years,

no corrections for many a moon. And we mean 10% and stay down to it. for a while, have none of it. Why? Because every correction is met by central bank talk, central bank teasing, or central bank intervention, which calls into question, are we in bubbles? Well, we've already known from the past that valuation will eventually matter. The question is, in the biotech space, why didn't it matter? Why didn't it matter? when biotex for two to three years come public and soar to valuations anywhere from $200 million to $8 billion,

and all the companies have one thing in common. They didn't even have sales. Some of the companies were just development stage, not even in trials. And of course, all brought to you by the wonderful human beings at the investment banks. That's bubbles. When you have a bond market in corporate land where you have bonds that used to yield 9% now yielding 3.5, that's bubbles.

When you have monstrously debt-laden countries that have negative interest rates, that's bubbles caused by interference. Just remember, economics 101 in bond land states, the more. debt you have, the more your debt is out of control, the more you should be paying your lenders. Are there lenders right now? If central banks are buying up all the stuff, the lenders, the people that want to buy the bonds, get crowded out. But when they do buy, they're getting yields much lower than the norm, prices much higher than the norm, which equates back to stock markets and not everything has to be in bubbles at once

in 2000 housing stocks were at one-time's earnings they actually bottomed when the market topped so all we do is sit back and we just think about what's the norm isn't normal to have a biotech company with an $8 billion market cap that has no sales

of course not when in the past have we seen something like this and what happened? Well, in 1999, you had a bunch of dot-com companies that had no sales with those types of market caps. And what was the outcome? Oh, 80% drop, 90% drop, bought out for pennies on the dollar, or just flat out gone to zero. That's the precedent that we always tend to look at. Thus, we always worry about what we are seeing.

we've always thought that markets were between buyers and sellers at specific prices that they wanted to do business at. Not anymore. Japan has admitted they have used their own printed money. By the way, Japan very debt-laden, they use their own printed money to buy up stocks. They've admitted it. Our central banks haven't,

and they say they don't want to be audited. hum we already know they've interfered with the income markets the bond markets because they had to admit it they were out front and center so the worry is we're in the midst of another bubble now as we talk right now we're not sure what date you're listening to and it may be a few months down the road from when we are talking and things may have already occurred we'll see so use this show as a broader thought process on central banks and bubbles. And let's keep fingers crossed that we're not. We aren't. We haven't been in a 99-type atmosphere. Now, let me be clear. Bubbles are great as they're going up. You want to harness them. We do not use the term bubble

badly while things are working. Oh, but we use it badly when things top. When the music stops. So we will always be watching closely because the biggest money is lost when everybody is at their most greedy

at the most ridiculous price structures out there. When everybody believes nothing can go wrong, that this is going to go on forever. Warren Buffett once said, beware of the naked man when he comes out of the ocean, when the surf drops and the tides roll in.

Let's hope there's no naked man out there, ladies and gentlemen. Sorry to give you that picture. Up next, we'll move a little forward. I want to talk about the importance of earnings, gaps, relative strength, and other stuff. Thanks for being here today. Thank you. I'm Gary. This is the one in only Investors Edge.

America is talking. Investors Edge. He's got to be pleased with that. The crowd is just on its feet here. He's a sooner on a boy. With Gary Colbomb. It comes highly recommended. You're going to feel better if you talk to it.

And welcome once again to Investors Edge. Today we are either climbing Mount Everest or it's a holiday. That's today's show. Every now and then we have special show, educational shows. This is one of those days. Thanks for joining us today. So we've talked about central banks. We've talked about bubbles, the potential for them, what they look like, how they feel.

How did they end? We'll give you the typical. You'd never really know how they're going to end, but typically they end at their noisiest. Really tough to define the word noisiest, but you'll get a feel when it happens. It's when everyone's talking about it, everyone's speaking about it,

front page or front cover of newsweek and time and all that type of stuff that's when you typically will know get ready if it ever does occur that's all just very very noisy then technically how do they trade they'll be very extended from their move everybody will think nothing will go wrong and then all the sudden you'll have this one big gigantic down day from the highs on monstrous volume that'll be the day where the balloon popped but that doesn't necessarily be the day that it's over and done because typically what will happen is you'll get a rally back up to the highs that's the rally that gets everybody saying we're fine we're good no sweat but then what happened You get another big down day, and it's the oi-vee moment.

What does this mean? Can't be. And then you'll get another big rally up near the highs, and you'll get another, told you so, we're fine. But those big swings are a sign that the sellers are now involved and are part of the equation. and it's at that point in time where you start getting what we call the slow, unnoticed, drip.

Then you'll break the first low and then potential for waterfall type action. Action that's uncontrollable, never stops. You think it has to come back and yet it doesn't. and then you're down 30 and you're thinking it had a big move

it's just got to be a correction then 40 and then 50 and then you won't know what hit you and in the case of whatever you're in that has no sales once they're down 80 you basically say

I don't care if it goes to zero now that's the cycle so please pay attention Moving on. We talk about it all the time. Earnings. What does a company make during a quarter?

What's the net income? Unfortunately, net income is pretty much a naked number. You can't play with it. Earnings per share, you can play with it. It is very often now where companies do big buybacks on purpose, use lower tax rates on purpose, shift assets from here to there, up and down and all around, contracts into one quarter to the next, and then you got it what we call a lot of non-gap earnings. That's generally accepted accounting principles. Well, anyway, the key to us and what we do

is not just the numbers. It's how things react to the numbers. So we are always watching for the great reaction to an earnings report, whether it's great to the upside or great to the downside. A big gap off of earnings is the most significant sign of accumulation

or distribution by the big boys because, A, if it's on the upside, demand for stock is such that they closed something at 80 and has to open at 87 because things were so darn good. Or demand for selling is so big that it closed at 80 and opened at 72 because things are headed south. And we are just letting you know from our studies of the past. In markets that are just range-bound, find those companies that have. have the strongest reaction to earnings reports in the best technical shape,

and typically for most of the rest of that quarter, they will tend to lead and lead well. So we're always in gear with that. Now, keep in mind, what you look for in these gaps is, A, on the first day, that it gaps, there's not a lot of give back. B, after the gap, it either keeps going or starts sitting tight or has nominal pullbacks on lighter volume indicating the buying is just petered out for now and we're just waiting for the next round of buying which could be days or just weeks away. Conversely, we always get the question, what if I own a stock that gaps down in a bad way? It sort of depends.

It depends on the company. it depends on what they said depends on the market keep in mind a significant amount of gaps to the downside may mean something about the market as well as gaps to the upside meaning something good about the market we're just letting you know this is first and foremost the things we watch for during earning season and if you have a chance go back five years and study all the earnings gaps to the upside and see how well they did. One quarter out, two quarters out, even a year out, because sometimes that gap is the start of something really good going on.

Now, in bad markets, in bare markets, you're not going to get a lot of great gaps to the upside. markets usually cap those things. In good markets, yeah, you'll get things gap into the downside, you always will, but typically less so. And in very good markets, we have seen plenty of times where things have big gaps to the downside, and they just rally right back up. That tells you a little bit about market conditions. Now, it is important. You should have estimates for the company.

you are watching and it is important you look for what the number that came in and whether they beat those estimates both on the sales front but more importantly on the earnings front because very often you can get turnarounds in companies where sales aren't going up significantly but you have a huge gargantuan move in earnings growth because of some changes they made on the expense side so it's very important you just don't look at a number it's just it's important that you just don't look at a stock. It's very important you just don't look at the gap. Know exactly whether the company's in a bull market, a bear market, whether the sector's in a bull market and a bear market, and why it gapped either up or down. And it is very often,

the ones that gap up, do it again and again and again. These are your great companies. Earning seasons for us is the most exciting time of the quarter, especially on the companies that we are following, the ones with the strongest earnings and revenue growth, with the greatest relative strength in the market, which simply means how is that stock doing versus the whole sector that it's in, as well as versus the rest of the market,

the market. Very important to watch that. It defines leadership in the market. Relative strength. So what exactly is relative strength? How do you measure relative strength? And why is it so important to watch other stocks in the sector of the company and stock that you are following? Just some other tricks of the trade we follow. So we'll wind it up next on relative strength, on cousin stocks. We thank you for being here. I'm Gary. This is the one and only investors. We're listening to.

What are we waiting for? Well, what are you waiting for? One, two, ready. Now, action. In investors edge. Incalpa. And welcome once again to investors. edge.

Thanks for being with us today. Again, we're either climbing Mount Everest, Mount Kilimanjaro, swimming with sharks off of the northeast coast of Australia, or it's a holiday. So we have a special educational show. We have heard you because we were using the same ones going back a few too many years. So this is the new improved version of... We're not here today's show. So let's move on.

We're talking markets. We're talking stocks, and we're talking the word relative strength. And that two words gets bandied about very much on Wall Street. To us, it's pretty simple. Is that stock leading or is it lagging? When the market is up, is it up more? When the market is down, is it down less? Simple as that.

we're looking for the strongest stocks in the market that if the market's going up 10 it's going up 20 if the market's going down 10 it's flat now you're never going to get perfection but the whole idea is to recognize where that big leadership is but how do you measure it what is the best way to measure relative strength

but really price is the best way you can actually look at it and see but we have found that the people at William O'Neill and Company have the best way. They use a relative strength line on the charts they use. Used to be on their daily graph charts. It's now called Market Smith. And their charts show you, number one,

a little line of the S&P and a little line of the stock, relative strength. And we just love when we see a state. where the market's doing nothing, the stock has its relative strength line into new high ground while the market's sitting. That's relative strength. We love when the market's cratering, cratering, and the stock you are following is just sitting, and the relative strength line is soaring, just waiting for the market to stop going down before price catches up.

This is what we are looking for in a daily basis. And we use that relative strength line, and it also comes with a number from 1 to 99 on those charts. It is a great weapon in the arsenal can tell you what your stock is doing, and you're always looking. My favorite way to know when to not buy something is something called a relative strength non-confirmation. And what that simply means is the market is ridiculously strong,

and your stock finally starts to move out of range, but it hasn't kept up with the market at all. It's just moving because it's being carried on a leash by the market. And when the market decides to turn and come down, the lack of strength in that stock takes it down more easily than something that busted out three weeks in. advance. So very important to watch as well as the cousin stocks. And what that simply means is if you have 25 restaurant stocks and they're all in a bare market and then one all of a sudden busts out

into a bullmark and starts rolling and then number two starts showing up and then number three, number four, number five, usually means the rest are going to follow to a certain extent and you start paying attention to every stock in the group. Now, there are industries, sectors that are notorious where everything moves hand in hand. The oils, it's commodity. Price goes up, just about everything goes up. So it's a little bit different than, let's say, the restaurants. I've seen plenty of times where you've had strong ones with weak ones at the same time.

And that's why you use the measuring stick of relative strength. when looking at cousin stocks. And let me say, when a group is starting to show up, in relative strength, you always want to pay attention to the first name or the second name, maybe the third name, that busts out. You typically do not want to go for that last one. The true strength will show up first.

The big leaders will show up first. there's a simple way they show up they'll be breaking above resistance levels and potentially showing up on the yearly new high list so we watch relative strength as well as cousin stocks together

we've heard some analysts say yeah buy the worst stock in a group when it starts moving we don't believe in that we're not saying the worst stock won't move we want the best. When you're picking sides on a basketball team, you're picking the worst or you're picking the best.

When you're looking for the great strength in the market, are you looking for the best or you're looking to the ones pulling up on the stretch? So very important, you put these two into your arsenal also. You can check out investors, market smith.com and check out those charts we do not get paid by them we're just letting you know what we use and you can look up the definitions of their relative strength and what they look like if you go to their site well we're almost down from mount kilomajaro hope we have

helped you today we're going to do more shows like this in an effort to educate we thank you for being here until next time you have a great evening evening drive carefully. And when you get home, do like we do. Simple. Make sure you hug your children. Night night, night off. Thanks for joining us for another edition of Investors Edge.

On the Biz Talk Radio Network, if you missed any of today's show or to get in touch with Gary Coltbaum, please go to Gary K.com. That's Gary K.com. To reach Gary Coltbaum at his office, call 1-8-4-2-5-559. That's 1-8-4-2-2-2-2-2-2. 5559. The opinions you hear on BizTalk Radio are those of the host, callers, and guests, and do not necessarily reflect those of this station Biz Talk Radio, its management or... Guys, it's no use putting it off.

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