Hello MarketClub Members everywhere, Adam Hewison here, wishing you a happy and prosperous May. I believe this month is going to be a very pivotal one for the stock market.
In the back of many traders' minds is the old market adage, "sell in May and go away". Is that what is going to happen this May? It is perhaps a little too early to tell as there are many, many factors in play the least of which is, of course, the presidential election which has electrified and gripped the country in a way that I have never seen before. Like always, I'm going to rely on the Trade Triangles to tell me what is going on in the marketplace.
This morning, Warren Buffett indicated that he would take his money out of the banks if he had to pay them to keep his money. What he was referring to was negative interest rates. Berkshire Hathaway, which is the operation that Warren Buffett runs, is a conglomerate of companies and has about $60 billion in cash that it keeps in the bank. With the current low-interest rates, Berkshire Hathaway is earning about $600 million a year as opposed to the several billion of dollars it would earn in a more normal interest rate environment.
So in essence when one of the top investors in the world indicates that he would pull his money out of banks, he was saying to Janet Yellen, the head of the Fed, to back off the idea of negative interest rates. Way to go Warren - I think you win this one. Continue reading "Did Warren Buffett Just Shoot Down Negative Interest Rates?"