Quick Musings

I unexpectedly have to be out today and maybe tomorrow on business so I don't have time right now to do anything more than offer a few quick thoughts.  I will try to put up something more substantive later in the week.  Here goes:

High yield bonds now for the most part offer yields under 5%.  That is too much risk for too little reward in my book.  I told you last week that these are marked for sale in my book and have in fact done some selling in this area.

Bullish sentiment amongst individual investors has been increasing now for the past month.  Expect to start seeing soon the inevitable articles about how the individual investor is always wrong as well as more articles either saying we are in an equity bubble or we are close to a market top.  The one thing that probability would suggest is that stocks have a reasonable likelihood of doing well between now and June 30th.  That's when the 2nd quarter ends.  The professional investing world has a strong incentive to keep markets looking well through that date.  Makes the quarterly performance numbers look better and helps all of us to get paid!

At some point there will be some political fallout here at home to the fact that Sunni militants have torched the trillion or so dollars we've invested in Iraq since 2003.  President Obama is likely to receive the lion's share of the blame but the GOP also doesn't come off looking so hot from this debacle.  

Ed Yardeni notes that the market seems to go up every time Janet Yellen speaks.