“It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble. It’s the things we know that just ain’t so.” Mark Twain I've been writing some more optimistic commentaries recently - or maybe just less pessimistic - and the response has been interesting to say the least. I don't remember so many people telling me how dumb [...]
JP Morgan reported their widely anticipated earnings Friday and the losses from the London Whale trading fiasco were huge. The firm had initially pegged the losses at $1 to 2 billion but the quarterly report showed the total has bulged to $5.8 billion. And according to the CFO there may be additional losses of $700 million to $1.7 billion. Naturally [...]
It is said that bull markets climb a wall of worry but if that were true, then Wall and Broad should look like downtown Pamplona in July with market bears gored, trampled, spindled, mutilated and wrapped around the buttonwood tree. The list of worries for investors seems to grow by the day with slowing Chinese growth center stage one day [...]
The cover of Barron's this week says, Outlook: Mostly Sunny. Their Big Money poll shows 55% of the professional money managers they surveyed are bullish on the stock market. If that makes you feel similarly optimistic about the near term outlook for shares, it might interest you to know that 59% of these perennially pollyannish souls were bullish at the same [...]
At Alhambra, as Joe Calhoun wrote last month, we embrace the merits of both value and momentum in investing. The decision to buy value or momentum, though, should not be made in isolation. At Alhambra, our tactical strategies embrace long term investment solutions which incorporate value and momentum decisions based, first, upon our analysis of fundamentals and the monetary and [...]
The investment team made the decision to take advantage of recent market strength and take our risk/return perspective from extremely favorable back close to neutral. The decision is the result of economic factors we have pegged as worthy of concern and further monitoring, a potential peak in short term investor sentiment and the uncertainty surrounding the future currency situation in [...]
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