Don Luskin

A report Tuesday from Steve Galbraith, strategist at Morgan Stanley, slashed his 2001 earnings forecast for the S&P 500 from $51 to $46 — about a 10% cut. But from the 1092 S&P close the day before the September 11 terrorist attack through the 1003 close...

What will happen if calling Tuesday’s attack an “act of war” ends up being more than an evocative metaphor? What if it really turns out to be just the first battle in a prolonged global conflict? What if it turns out to be — not to be overly...

What inspiring, bullish news. It’s the dawn of a great new era. I can feel my animal spirits rising. That’s right. Didn’t you feel the same way yesterday when you heard that the Department of Justice wouldn’t seek the break-up of Microsoft?...

Hewlett Packard buying Compaq isn’t exactly going to save the world. If that’s the best thing this market can come up with as a catalyst, we’re in a heap of trouble. About the only good thing you can say about the market right now is that the major...

When Ronald Reagan accepted his party’s nomination for president in 1980 he said, “When your friend is out of a job, that’s a recession. When you are out of a job, that’s a depression. And when Jimmy Carter is out of a job, that’s a...

My favorite stock in The Luskin Report’s model portfolios is Numerical Technologies. Now that I’m not running Other People’s Money in a mutual fund anymore, I’m free to buy individual stocks in my account for the first time in almost two years....

My hopes that the markets had reached a secondary bottom last week were completely dashed Wednesday and yesterday, as the bad news came pouring out like blood from an open wound. The charts of all the broad indices have completely ruptured. Yesterday’s cavalcade...

Comments and questions continue to flood in about deflation. After months of writing about it the subject is finally getting real traction. You read about it in the mainstream financial press and hear about it on CNBC almost every day now. So let’s get to some...

I’ve written a lot about deflation over the last three or four months. But yesterday’s column on it, published here, got me an especially big flood of responses. One especially interesting one came by email, and I’m going to reproduce it here, and...

Remember all those books in the 1980s about “kaizen,” “kanban,” “keiretsu” and all the other secrets of Japanese management that were supposed to save American industry? Well, it must have worked — and perhaps too well....

I’ve been saying for weeks that the markets would be waiting for Cisco’s earnings report — which was released yesterday after the bell — to set the tone for the post-earnings season world. That’s because Cisco was a winner of “the...

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal ran an extraordinary op-ed piece by George Gilder, called Tumbling into the Telechasm. In it, the celebrated author of Telecosm and the publisher of the Gilder Technology Report lists all the federal government’s catastrophic...

As we continue through the slow and painful process of building a bottom after the great techwreck of 2000/2001, we have the opportunity to crash-test a great investment thesis from the irrationally exuberant era of the late great bull market — “gorilla...

Does the market ever go up on a day when Alan Greenspan talks? I can’t remember when it ever has. On July 18, 2001, the markets gapped lower on the opening. They tried to recover in the first hour, but as soon as the prepared text of Greenspan’s testimony...

Ever since I started trading and investing in the 1970s I have looked at stock charts every day. I am entirely aware of — and respectful of — the empirical and theoretical arguments against the predictive value of charting. And yet, at the same time, I...

What to make of this completely crazed market? It’s simple (but that doesn’t make it any more bearable): we’re right on a major cusp. Four critical indices — the NASDAQ Composite, the Russell 2000, the Wilshire Total Market Value Index, and the...

Suddenly we find ourselves back in the nightmare world of the pregnant chad. And everything was going so well, too. Whatever you may think of the policies of George W. Bush’s new administration, at least it was clanking along pretty well and the political...

I have touched the third rail, and it is made of gold. For millennia gold has excited mankind’s passions, goading us to the heights of achievement and the depths of evil. Now, since I’ve been writing about gold’s role in the international monetary...