No market goes up in a straight line, and so the US stock market was due a pull back at some stage. The question that you have to ask at this point is whether this is a typical market retreat following a 4 month almost straight line rise or is it something more sinister?

Yesterday we had a long look at solar and battery power and how they affect the electricity sector. Today we extend the battery analysis to the oil sector and look at electric cars. “It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.” Mark Twain ...

Fossil fuels have a limited time as viable sources of energy. And I’m not talking about saving the planet or carbon taxes, simply economics. Coal, gas, oil, all have economics based on a “scarcity curve” – the more we use them, the deeper we need to dig to find more and more expensive they become ...

Interesting article out yesterday revealing the largesse local developers are now showering brokers and spruikers real estate advisers (I hesitate to call them financial advisers for obvious reasons) with to help move unsold stock from upcoming off the plan apartment developments.

Goldman Sachs offers this chart on central bank independence:

As covered today by Leith over at MacroBusiness here and here, today's ABS release confirms what most of us suspect, that wage growth in the long term is looking pretty bleak. Therefore it might be pertinent to think about how this outlook might affect you.

Fund results out today from S&P are not good for active fund managers:

Snapchat is listing shortly, probably early March. It's a unicorn, a start-up with a valuation over $1b. It's going to be valued at lots (USD25b?), and it loses money, which makes it hard to value. In the end, it's a lottery ticket.

AMP released their results last week, bringing with it news that it was reducing its adviser numbers across the network. This comes as no surprise given the results but does continue the trend of adviser number reductions across the big players in the market.

Last week I ran through the big long-term (20-40 year) economic trends (click here for the full post) that investors should be aware of, noting that a couple of these trends (women in the workforce, the ratio of workers to non-workers and maybe trade) are changing for the worse. Stage two (today’s ...