We got another disappointing employment report last week. Well, that’s what everyone said anyway, that the complete WAG by the BLS that the US economy added 559,000 jobs in May was below expectations and disappointing. I suppose it is a tad disappointing but I find it hard to lament the fact that a half million […]
The US economy is still stuck in the stall its been in since early spring. Sometime in mid-March everything just seems to have gone into suspended animation. Interest rates and the copper/gold ratio stopped rising. Real interest rates (TIPS) stopped rising. The US dollar started falling. But nothing has fallen so far as to warrant […]
It was hard not to hear about cryptocurrencies last week what with the bear market and all. Actually, you can make the case that bitcoin has had two bear markets since mid-April. There was a 27% decline followed by a 27% rally, followed by last week’s rout. From its intraday peak in April to its intraday […]
Last week I was contacted by two clients seeking information about cryptocurrencies. One was my godson, 12 years old and just getting started in investing. So far, he’s bought Nintendo and Roblox (the latter against my recommendation but what do I know about video games?). But last week he said he wants to buy a […]
April 15th was the two week anniversary of the day my wife and I got our second Moderna shot. We have spent the last 13 months being very careful about the virus, limiting our contacts, social distancing and generally doing anything that seemed helpful. I am certainly aware that others took a more liberal attitude […]
The answer to the question, “What should I do to my portfolio today (this week, this month)? is almost always nothing. Humans, and especially portfolio managers, have a hard time believing that doing nothing is the right response….to anything…or nothing. We are programmed to believe that success comes from doing things, not not doing things. […]
There’s an old saying on Wall Street that one should “buy the rumor, sell the news”, a pithy way to express the efficient market theorem. By the time an event arrives, whatever it may be, the market will have fully digested the news and incorporated it into current prices. And then the market will move […]
I’ve been getting that question a lot these days. How high can rates go? It is asked in a way that seems to imply that the answer is obvious – not much. Why? The answer is almost always the same; the Fed can’t and won’t let rates go up. If they did it would kill […]
I was told many years ago when I started in this business that it wasn’t my job to predict the future. Our job as investors is to properly and accurately interpret the present.
Last week was only four days due to the President’s day holiday but it was eventful. The big news of the week was the spike in interest rates, which according to the press reports I read, “came out of nowhere”. In other words, the writers couldn’t find an obvious cause for a 14 basis point […]