Hedging costs after the debt deal
Last week, with the debt ceiling negotiations dragging on, we looked at the costs of hedging a handful of equity index, gold-, Treasury bond-, and dollar index-tracking ETFs. Below is a snapshot showing the current hedging costs of the same basket of ETFs.

Hedging against a >30% correction [...]

Chafing at the world’s reserve currency
After the excitement of the U.S. debt ceiling negotiations going down to the wire, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin offered these comments about the U.S. and its dollar:
They are living like parasites off the global economy and their monopoly of the dollar.
[...]
If over there (in America) [...]

Credit Suisse on the consequences of a default
On Thursday, Credit Suisse’s global strategy team said that a U.S. default was still unlikely. However, they predicted that if the U.S. did default, stocks would suffer a 30% drop.

Hedging against a >30% correction in stocks
With that in mind, the table below shows the costs, as [...]

The chances of a debt ceiling deal
The Intrade prediction market enables participants to bet on whether Congress will approve an increase in the U.S. debt ceiling to $15.1 trillion on or before three dates: July 31st, August 31st, and September 30th. As of Tuesday evening, these were the chances of [...]

– Richard Florida was back this week, with another implausible job creation idea. My article about it on Seeking Alpha: “Richard Florida’s Latest Job Creation Idea“.
– In an earlier article (“Helping House Majority Leader Eric Cantor Hedge His Treasuries Exposure“), I mentioned a way to hedge against a U.S. default by using [...]

Portfolio Armor update
I met with the finance Ph.D. who devised Portfolio Armor’s algorithm yesterday to discuss some potential expansions of the algorithm. More to come on that. If you have any feature requests, feel free to mention them in the comments.
June was another record month for paid downloads of the Portfolio Armor iOS app, [...]

Seeking Alpha published this article of mine yesterday which recaps recent events with Alloy Steel International and offers a forward-looking speculation or two.