New Record-Highs Everywhere with Stocks—Gold Almost Ready to Move

There are a lot of stocks that are doing well in this market. Because there is no uniformity to business conditions in both the U.S. economy and the rest of the world, I’m making a conscious effort to attribute less weight to the major stock market indices and more to individual companies and their specific business conditions. I hate to say it, but the main stock market indices can be quite misleading, and one company can skew the index (like Apple Inc. [NASDAQ/AAPL] when it was at its high). The way I look at the stock market and the economy today is with very low expectations. If U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) can grow faster than the rate of inflation, then that’s a good accomplishment. I hope the Federal Reserve is right with its prediction of 2.5% in U.S. GDP growth in 2012 and 3.5% in 2013. Of course, these forecasts change all the time, so it doesn’t mean much. So, while...