M
    Matt Nesto

    Matt Nesto

    Matt Nesto is co-host for Yahoo! Finance’s Breakout, covering investing analysis throughout the trading day. Prior to joining Yahoo!, Nesto was a correspondent and stocks editor for CNBC, and earlier, he was at Bloomberg Television covering financial markets from five different countries. Nesto also spent time as a financial consultant and investment adviser for Lehman Brothers, Prudential Securities and Merrill Lynch.

  • Housing on the Rebound: Is it Better to Rent or Buy?

    Unlike the stock market, which is setting at record highs, the housing market has yet to recover from the depths of the last recession. While real estate sales and prices are trending higher and are clearly better off than they were a few years (or even months) ago, a full recovery is still far off. [...]

  • No Food Inflation? Take a Look at Lettuce

    One of the great mysteries of the whole easing era — the past five years of unprecedented intervention and activism orchestrated by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke — is that it hasn't led to rampant inflation...at least not yet. While economists routinely strip out food and fuel when they look at pricing data to derive what [...]

  • Tracking Tech and the Rotation Into Risk

    If you are lucky enough to be holding a basket of Health Care stocks (XLV) that are up 20% so far this year, it is highly likely that you would be looking for ways to preserve those gains in the face of a market that's at all time highs and on track for a sixth [...]

  • Breakout or Fakeout: Is the Next Big Move for Stocks Up or Down?

    After waiting more than five years for the Dow and S&P 500 to break above their previous all-time highs set in 2007, investors have been eager to learn whether this move was the start of something big, or more like the end of a nice run. The jury is still out, as the new high [...]

  • Risk On, Baby! Record High Stocks Stoke Investor Demand

    Once upon a time, three-and-a-half long weeks ago, there was fear that the world was unraveling, the markets were set to crash, the tiny euro zone nation Cyprus was about to implode, and budget cuts would throw us into recession again. Somehow, amidst all that worry and doubt, we not only survived, but thrived. The [...]

  • The Next Big Record Will Be Earnings, Says Colas

    The death defying run-up in the stock market the past five months has been nothing short of astonishing. Not only have the benchmark equity indexes gained more than 15% since mid-November, but they've hit their record highs amidst an endless storm of distress. While skeptics and bears have had ample fodder to poo-poo the market's [...]

  • Fed’s Tapering Talk Continues, Bond Buying Could Ease By Summer

    In love, it has been said, it is not so much what you say, but what you do that matters. In short, actions speak louder than words. For Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke however, the opposite is true. For many in the investment world, the fact that the Fed is even talking about ''tapering'' its [...]

  • Earnings Guidance: Why Are Companies So Negative?

    You've surely seen the ad for Trident gum bragging that "four out of five dentists recommend sugarless gum." While this overwhelming endorsement always made me wonder about the fifth dentist, the collective message of the majority is clear and powerful. Interestingly, we have a comparable situation brewing on Wall Street right now. As we approach [...]

  • After Alcoa: What Is Wall Street Expecting From Q1 Earnings Season?

    There is no surer sign that Spring has arrived than when the daffodils start to bloom and the country's biggest aluminum producer unveils its perennial April offering, better known as first quarter earnings. While Alcoa's (AA) results are out, 95% of the S&P 500 has yet to report their numbers but the street is ready [...]

  • Kohl’s: Next Retailer to Go Private?

    "Expect Great Things" is the tagline that mid-market department store Kohl's (KSS) puts on all of its marketing material. Unfortunately, Wall Street analysts aren't expecting anything great, as the current percentage of buy ratings stands at just 41%, which according to FactSet, is a six-year low. Put another way, "the bad news is already priced [...]

  • Alcoa Earnings Matter More Than You Think

    Every three months, the smallest and least consequential member of the world's most elite stock grouping is showered with disproportionate attention when its quarterly earnings come out. I am referring, of course, to Alcoa (AA) and the upcoming release of its first quarter results. Because of its unique position as one of only thirty companies [...]

  • The Facebook Phone: Goodbye Icons, Hello Photos

    Nearly three years after Facebook (FB) and Taiwanese device-maker HTC first offered up the unpopular ChaCha and Salsa phones to highlight the social networking site, they're at it again. Only this time, there's a twist. With the newest offering, you don't necessarily have to buy a particular phone, you can also download Facebook's just unveiled [...]

  • Central Banks Gone Wild: Japan Raises Stakes in Losing Battle

    It takes a lot to truly surprise those who follow and interpret the actions of central bankers around the world; partly because it is a central banker's job to clearly inform markets of their intentions to calm them, not roil them. As my co-host Jeff Macke and I discuss In the attached video, when the [...]

  • Will Gold Absorb the €uro’s Refugees?

    Say what you will about the news cycle, but it is amazing how quickly stories go from dominating our thoughts on the front page, to taking their place alongside countless other dramas that get stored in our mental informational warehouses. A timely example of this is Cyprus. The beleaguered island nation was thrust into the [...]

  • SEC Clears the Way for Tweeting CEOs

    After 29 years of loyal government service, Tuesday will go down as a sad day for Edgar. That's the acronym the Securities and Exchange Commission uses for its Electronic Data-Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval system --a digital data dumping ground that is often seen as the place where financial reports go to die. Not only is [...]

  • Goldman Sachs’ Apple Downgrade Is Perfect Buy Signal: Henssler’s Parrish

    It is the biggest, fastest-growing market on earth for consumer goods, but China is also still one of the few places where large foreign companies can wake up one morning and find themselves expelled from doing business there. And it's exactly why Apple (AAPL), after two weeks of being hounded in the local press about [...]

  • Got Low-Yield Burnout? Consider Boring Large Caps: Henssler’s Parrish

    Much has been said lately about a great shift of investor assets that has seen billions of dollars rotating from bonds into stocks. So pronounced is this wave of money that it is consistently cited as one of the key reasons why markets have been able to defy all sorts of threats and obstacles and [...]

  • Stocks Are Cheap and Can Go Higher Despite Sub-Par Growth: Stovall

    The Dow (^DJI) and the S&P 500 (^GSPC) may be at record highs but stock prices are still far from peak. As much as this may sound like some sort of bad financial riddle, the fact of the matter is that by most accounts, stocks are still cheap. "Whether you look forward, or to the [...]

  • Loving This Market? You’ve Got it All Wrong: Elliott Wave’s Hochberg

    We've all heard the routine in which emergency medical technicians rattle off a string of data to characterize the physical condition of a patient. By going through this checklist of vital signs, doctors immediately know where to focus their attention and what to fix first. In much the same way, Steve Hochberg, the chief market [...]

  • Will Q1′s Fast Start Lead to a Slow Finish? Nope, Says Stovall

    After powering to a record high to close out the first quarter on a positive note, things aren't going nearly as swimmingly now that we've turned the calendar pages to April. As much as the long-term track record for this month is positive and the second quarter results are good, many are still fearful that [...]