Finance Trends Letter

Have you ever wanted to spend a month hitchhiking your way across country, or see the American landscape pass by from the inside of a freight train boxcar?  In the Vice documentary series, How to Hitchhike Across America: Thumbs Up , artist David Choe and his friend/nephew Harry Kim show us how to do just that.    Note : You can watch the full series by clicking through to the next episode link at the end of each clip. I started watching this series on YouTube without any real expectations and was sucked in. The two start off hopping a freight train out of Los Angeles. As they make their way, slowly, to Las Vegas, we hear a bit of back story on David's life and their immediate plans for the trip.  While I won't give away all the details of their trip, I will say this: only in America can you hop out of a freight train boxcar and walk right over to your comped room at the Venetian. Now, what I didn't know until after I started watching is that David Choe is a r

We've reached a new all-time high on the S+P 500 (in nominal terms, anyway) with today's close of 1,658.78.  Four years from the March 2009 bottom, we're up nearly 1,000 points on the SPX. If we go back to the weekly close of 1,576 from the last bull market high (in October 2007), that's a 1,902 point round-trip in the S+P. We've gone down, and back up, the mountain in that time.  There has been broad participation in this latest move higher, with over 90% of S+P 500 stocks trading above their 200 day moving average. The trend is up and the market continues to climb the (increasingly global) wall of worry. Not to mention, as Ray Dalio learned some time ago, " currency depreciation and money printing are good for stocks ". Related posts :  1. Bonds vs. stocks: March 2009 - April 2013 . 2. Lessons from Hedge Fund Market Wizards: Ray Dalio .