The week ahead and a visit to the Little Bighorn

Background music: Just chillin by Polished Chrome

Earlier this week we went on a road trip to check off a Bucket List item that after living in Colorado for 20 years and a deep interest in 19th century western history: The Little Bighorn.    While Custer’s defeat in Southern Montana is not the black hole conspiracy mystery such as the JFK assassination, it remains so full of unanswered questions. One of the many things remarkable about the Little Bighorn is the placement of markers on the spots where U.S. cavalrymen fell. The various Indian nations are still in the process of placing their own markers where their warriors fell as well. These markers give you a really good idea of happenings of those fateful hours.

Happenings from last week and looking to the week ahead:

Our client portfolios exceeded the return of the S&P 500 by a hefty 2.7% last week due largely to the sale of National Technical Systems which surged 38% on the news of its sale for $23 a share.

While its possible we may currently be in for a mild market pullback the underlying economic fundamentals still support our full equity exposure.

Bob Diehl of nospinforecast.com who developed the Aggregate Spread is giving us an all-clear signal in the search for an impending recession. His method looks 9 months into the future and is giving a green light up to at least April 2014.

In other macro economic news recessionalert.com is giving an all-clear signal as well. Dwaine Van Vuuren of recessionalert (RA) has developed a very intriguing stock market health model that incorporates economic data and stock market technical statistics. I expect I’ll be tinkering with his models shortly and investigating how well the synergy exists between his work and our own.

Green Investing Alert: Our proprietary quantitative ranking systems have identified a stock long enamored by the socially responsible / green investing community: Gaiam

Gaiam is a retailer that caters to the yoga/wellness market. What may be the catalyst going forward is the sale of their stake in Real Goods Solar which is allowing Gaiam to add a significant amount of cash to their balance sheet.

We have no positions in Gaiam at the time of this post.

Brad Pappas