If they don’t learn, they will get burned. The advent of self-directed, app-driven retail trading has been a double-edged sword as it democratized investing but also brought unprepared participants into the fold. Now, they’re back in the meme-stock trade and they’re moving markets, for better or for worse.

There’s a major event looming, but it’s not what everybody thinks. This time around, what’s important is not the size of the interest rate hike that the Federal Reserve is about to impose, but what Chairman Jerome Powell says afterwards. In the February 1 FOMC...

If 2022 was a test of patience, 2023 will be a test of new highs for precious metals. As longstanding resistance levels in gold and silver are shattered, media pundits will have to redraw the lines on their charts and short-sellers will scramble to cover their positions.

Jeremy Grantham, co-founder and chief investment strategist at Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo & Co., is well-respected among the investing community. When he issues a warning, people listen – and just recently, Grantham signaled a stock-market decline that will be fairly mild at best, and painfully deep at worst.

This year’s World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, was supposed to be an opportunity for leaders of developed nations to address issues like inflation, supply-chain disruptions, and the growing wealth gap. At the same time, the pressing issue of overbearing sovereign debt remains largely unaddressed.

When it traded between $16,000 and $17,000 for months on end, hardly anyone in the media wanted to talk about Bitcoin. Now that it broke above $23,000, suddenly the pundits and plenty of social media commentators are bullish on Bitcoin. Does this mean the train has already left the station, though?

It’s an easy platform for career politicians to stand on and pander to the crowds. Just call yourself the “green” candidate, the populist who will fight the evil oil companies and wean the world off of fossil fuels forever. This has surface-level appeal, but skeptical minds must dig deeper, ferret out the facts, and look for substance.

As goes January, so goes the year… or so they say, but just as economists were mostly dead wrong about 2022, their outlook for 2023 must be taken with a huge grain of salt. If last year should teach us anything, it’s that the markets will fool most people most of the time and that central bank policy can turn on a dime.

2022 was brutal for financial traders, but history shows that back-to-back negative years in the stock market are rare. So, will this year bring a relief rally or more pain? Either way, high inflation means cash is trash and undervalued stocks should perform comparatively well in the long run.

With a 19.4% drawdown, the S&P 500 just had its worst year since the financial crisis of 2008. The NASDAQ fared even worse after a 33% decline, while the Dow Jones’ 9% dip seemed modest in comparison. Indeed, 2022 was a very bad year – or quite possibly, a terrific setup for 2023.

Investors remain ambivalent as 2022 comes to an end, but one thing’s for sure: this wasn’t the year that anybody in the financial press expected. Next year is bound to have its own twists, turns, and surprises, but traders can get a leg up if they know where we are in the current long-term economic cycle.