Six months ago, the US was still reporting 226K new cases of COVID a day, a rate that would peak in the first half of January at over 300k. Daily deaths also peaked in those first two weeks of the new year at over 4000. The economy was still struggling to recover, most restaurants surviving on takeout traffic, and no [...]
I thought of Gilda Radner this past week. Actually, I thought of a character she created on the original Saturday Night Live, Emily Litella, who was a regular on the Weekend Update segment. She'd start to rant about something topical, getting it completely wrong at which point Jane Curtin or Chevy Chase would explain it to her and she'd respond. [...]
The US economy is still stuck in the stall it's 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 concern about a double-dip recession. [...]
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 cryptocurrency. He first mentioned Dogecoin [...]
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 as is their right. But, for [...]
One of the most common complaints I hear about the markets is that they are "divorced from reality", that they aren't acting as the current economic data would seem to dictate. I've been in this business for 30 years and I think I first heard that in year one. Or maybe even before I decided to lose my mind and [...]
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. And so, often we look [...]
It is said that there are two types of people in this world. Those who see the glass as half full and those who see it as half empty. On Wall Street, we call them bulls and bears. A bull can see an economic report and perceive it in a way that seems wholly illogical, misguided, and downright stupid to [...]
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 the economy and raise the [...]
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. I was also told that wasn't as easy as it sounded and the current consensus about the state of the world was probably, almost certainly, almost always, [...]
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