Investment "Logic"

After a short week, the market was down slightly, but not by a lot.  As is typical of short weeks, very little information of major value came out.  However, a wet blanket was thrown onto what was appearing to be a bullish resurgence.  Federal Reserve voting member James Bullard made comments stating that the next rate hike could be any time now.  He did associate the conditions of a strong jobs report being a potential catalyst to such a decision.  As such, we saw the price of oil drop, and the value of the dollar increase on Wednesday.  There was a bounce back on Thursday, but since this was a short week, how reliable was it?  It does go to show there will be a lot of importance of watching the March non-farm payroll numbers, which will be released this Friday, as the strength of the results could very well dictate the direction the market starts taking.   It's frustrating to see such discourse from the Fed.  You're constantly getting mixed messages of what might happe

Hello again, everyone.  I apologize for the hiatus, but I had a combination of real-life activities come up which pulled me away from being able to maintain my blog.  Just before I left, Ionis Pharma reported numbers for the fourth quarter.  I haven't had a chance to report on it, but the general gist I have seen is that things are good, but the sector is bad, so the same old volatility continued. A lot has happened since I last reported, so I think the first thing I need to do is revisit the list of items I called out that will need to happen to improve the markets (as it's fairly obvious the market has improved since last time, I want to note the factors as to why and use this to help determine how much strength might exist).  First up is oil, which was a major driver of stock direction before my break.  We saw WTI crude get down to the mid-20s and then bounce back into the 30s.  It bounced around there for a bit, but as of this week, has now risen back into the low 40