Happy hump-day, friends and fellow traders. Well, maybe Wednesday wasn't hump day in the sense of it being the middle of the work/trading week, as markets are closed on Friday in observance of Good Friday; we're well past the halfway point of the trading week. Again, we won't be publishing anything on Friday. We will be publishing a newsletter on Thursday and Monday though. Anyway, we've got a handful of things to get through today, starting with a response to something Robert Kiyosaki - the guy who wrote "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" - has rekindled of late that he first suggested would happen this year as far back as 2002. The Other Side of the Coin I've never read any of his books, but I've heard Robert Kiyosaki speak. Pretty smart guy. He usually has some good points to make, though it's more personal-finance stuff than the trading topics we like to discuss. Anyway, there was something he said back in his 2002 book "Rich Dad's Prophecy" about what would happen in 2016 that, of course, is all the rage now that the year is here. Long story made short, Kiyosaki calculated that 2016 would be the year the thickest part of the wave of baby-boomers turned 70 and half. That means they'll now be required by law to start taking IRA distributions, which means they'll start to sell about 5% of whatever they've get in their retirement accounts every year for the rest of their lives. Moreover, more and more baby-boomers will join the required-minimum-distribution crowd for the next several years, adding to the selling pressure on the stocks they decide to shed to take those distributions. That's a lot of selling. I tried to figure out just how much money would be converted from stocks to cash as a result of this wave, but I could find nothing. My guess is, though, it's going to be measured in the billions by the time all those boomers are taking their RMDs a few years from now. For a $22 trillion market (U.S.), that's some appreciable pressure. Kiyosaki's concern about a looming collapse is understandable. There's just one flaw I see in his logic - what are all those retirees going to do with all that money they're taking out of their IRAs? The answer isn't tough to figure out. They're going to spend it. They'll spend it on drugs, retirement homes, food, and entertainment. They may give some of it away to family members. Heck, some of them will even reinvest it. The point it, the money isn't going away. That money is just going to be taken out of the stock market and injected into the economy, which-oh-by-the-way helps drive the stock market higher. In that light, one can't help but wonder if this mass cashing-out from all those funds trapped in IRA accounts will have a positive net impact on the market rather than an adverse one. Bottom Line: for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction. It's true in physics, and it's true of money. If you were sweating Kiyosaki's concern, I don't think you need to. Hear it For Yourself Most of you will recall on Tuesday Oakridge Global Energy Solutions (OGES) hosted its first-ever conference call, mostly talking about how it got to where it is today and what it's going to do from here. I know from speaking with some of you that you were on the call, but there is a bunch of you that couldn't participate because you were working. Well, good news... there IS a replay. You can access it by dialing (712) 775-7039, and using the code 684304#. Again, if you're at all curious about OGES, the call would be time well spent. There was some stuff on the call that wasn't clarified anywhere else I've seen yet. Food for Thought On Monday I was a little bit worried about real estate in general, and about homebuilders in particular. Sales of existing homes slumped to a pace 5.08 million in February, down from January's 5.47 million units, and turning a weakening uptrend into a flat-out sideways trend. Today, after hearing last month's pace of new-home sales, we can rest a little easier. The rate went up to 512,000 units, up from January's 502,000, extending a slow but reliable uptrend. There was something James Brumley said on Tuesday though - coupled with something everybody was talking about on Monday when the existing home sales news was released - that really got me thinking. Long story made short, the biggest thing holding the housing market back right now isn't a lack of demand, but a lack of supply. And we don't mean just a little bit of limited supply, which would push home prices a little higher than they might normally move. We mean there's just not enough supply of enough of the right houses to meet the actual demand. We're not just making the idea up either - there's some empirical evidence. On the chart below we've plotted the total inventory of existing homes for sale and the months-supply of new homes (based on the current sales pace of new homes). Both are at or near multi-year lows. Underscoring this idea, James pointed out on Tuesday that residential construction spending was up 7% a couple of months ago (on a year-over-year basis), and that remodeling demand was still going strong. The counterargument against using remodeling demand as a bullish sign is that it's a sign people just can't afford to buy homes right now, which speaks against real estate. I'm not buying that argument though. With home prices still on the rise and a clear lack of inventory, I've got a feeling many would-be buyers just aren't finding a house they like and instead are just improving the one they've already got. If it was a "nobody can afford to buy" thing going on right now, we wouldn't see these other things happening the way they are. That's my view anyway. Maybe you see something else. I just wanted to show you this data so you had the tools to work with to come to a conclusion, if you weren't sure what the future held for construction stocks. Right on Cue OK, we're getting low and time and room, so we'll keep today's look at the overall market short and sweet and limit ourselves to a look at just one chart. Here it is... the S&P 500... It's not surprising or unusual. The market's gone a couple of weeks without any real break whatsoever, and the prime place to take one is at some well-established resistance levels. Here's the thing - today's pullback means nothing. We could get another one tomorrow, and that would wouldn't mean anything either. Until the S&P 500 breaks below all that support between 1997 and 2017, the uptrend is still decidedly alive. It's just taking a breather. Note there wasn't a lot of volume behind Wednesday's weakness. We'll talk in greater detail about it on Thursday and/or Monday. Until then, have a great afternoon.