How often do you check your brokerage account? There is a famous economics paper from 1997, written by some of the giants in behavioral finance (Thaler, Kahnemann, Tversky & Schwartz), that tested what is known as myopic loss aversion. What they found was that investors who check their performance less frequently are more willing to […]
Jerome Powell delivered his long anticipated speech at Jackson Hole last week. Well actually, I have no idea if he was actually in Jackson Hole since the speech was delivered electronically, another victim of the delta variant. The virus itself rated barely a mention in Mr. Powell’s remarks and I think that is probably as […]
Today is the 50th anniversary of the “Nixon shock”, the day President Richard Nixon closed the gold window and ended the post-WWII Bretton Woods currency agreement. That agreement, largely a product of John Maynard Keynes, pegged the dollar to gold and most other currencies to the dollar. It wasn’t a true gold standard as only […]
Remember “The New Normal”? Back in 2009, Bill Gross, the old bond king before Gundlach came along, penned a market commentary called “On the Course to a New Normal” which he said would be: “a period of time in which economies grow very slowly as opposed to growing like weeds, the way children do; in […]
They’re out there panicking right now. I can feel it. They’re out there. They’re panicking. Look at them. Eddie Murphy as Billy Ray Valentine in Trading Places I thought of that scene the other day when a good friend in the investment business told me that investors today are panicking into the market rather than […]
If you were waiting for a correction in stock prices to put some money to work, you got your chance last week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down nearly 1000 points at the low Monday and closed down 725, a loss of a little over 2%. The S&P 500 did a little better but […]
Is there anyone left out there who doesn’t know the rate of economic growth is slowing? The 10 year Treasury yield has fallen 45 basis points since peaking in mid-March. 10 year TIPS yields have fallen by the same amount and now reside below -1% again. Copper prices peaked a little later (early May), fell […]
Until last week you hadn’t heard much about the bond market rally. I told you we were probably near a rally way back in early April when the 10-year was yielding around 1.7%. And I told you in mid-April that the 10-year yield could fall all the way back to the 1.2 to 1.3% range. […]
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. George Orwell, 1984 I have said many times and believe deeply that our job as investors is not to predict the future but merely to interpret the present as accurately as we can. I’ve also said […]
The Fed has to talk and traders gotta trade so after every meeting we get the Emily Litella memorial market dance. You’d be better off taking Fed meeting week off and watching reruns of the first few seasons of SNL.
