Raising the Caution Flag
Over the years I have been to a few of those spectacles know as NASCAR races. I am not really a huge race fan anymore, but going to them is still exciting -- the cars barrel along nose to nose, and door to door, at well over 100 miles per hour. Every once in a while, when there is an accident or something on the track that might endanger the drivers, a caution is called. This gives NASCAR time to remove the dangers, and because it is too dangerous to be on the track at a high speed, everyone slows down a bit until it is safe again.
For the stock market, it looks to me like the caution flag is out right now. The first indication that it may be time to slow down comes from my regular screening activity. There simply are not many stocks that qualify as cheap right now. As I examined Thursday, big-cap names are not particularly cheap in spite of the Wall Street cheerleading, and even the smaller stocks do not offer many screaming bargains. My basic Walter Schloss-based screen has just 30 names on it right now, the fewest since the beginning of 2008. Not a single U.S. company turns up on my "triple six" screen right now. Stocks simply are not very cheap right now....540 more words left in this article. To read them, just click below and try Real Money FREE for 14 days.
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