Capital Growth

In this past weekend’s newsletter, I discussed the issue of the markets next “Minsky Moment.”

The automotive market is running lean.

Inflation has been on the rise recently, raising concerns about long-run inflation and its impact on the spending power of those who can least afford it—investors approaching or already in retirement.

The United States is just at the beginning of a housing boom that could last for the next five years.

You may not be familiar with the term metaverse, but if you’ve been a consumer of popular books, movies and video games over the past 30 years or so, you probably are aware of the concept.

I am worried the Fed will either let inflation become psychologically entrenched, or wait too long to stop it and spark crisis with a too-hasty response, but there are other possibilities. None are especially good.

The yield curve is a powerful indicator. More powerful than many others as May West reminds us. As the greatest reopening momentum now appears behind us, today, our All-Weather portfolio looks more all-weather than it did earlier in the year.

Howard Marks doesn’t make bets on economic predictions. That’s especially true now when the biggest wildcard is inflation – a phenomenon no one fully understands. But just because something is unknowable doesn’t mean it’s unimportant. That’s why Howard has devoted his latest memo to a topic he largely disavows: macro forecasting.

Equities continued to rally in the second quarter, but the market remains undecided about whether the recent uptick in inflation is more likely to be transitory or persistent.

Senior Global Equity Opportunities Analyst Julian Wellesley discusses the role of banking in racial wealth inequality in the US and the steps banks could take toward financial inclusion.

What is the degree of Emerging Markets (EM) stocks’ undervaluation relative to United States (US) equities?

Despite a strengthening economy in the second quarter, investors were highly focused on the Federal Reserve’s response to the recent spike in inflation data.

The industry is now seeing an expansion in data-driven practices, with new ESG and climate datasets emerging and becoming mainstream.

In part 1 I looked at the most reasonably valued 10 stocks out of the 30 Dow Jones Industrial Average Constituents.

China’s regulatory crackdown on education and tech companies led early this week to a dramatic sell-off that started in Chinese stocks and extended into offshore Chinese currency and credit markets.

The first chart shows that the market cap of firms trading at over 20x sales has hit $4.5 trillion. This is another example of the reckless speculation underway today. Please read on to see how these speculative 20x price-to-sales firms did post the dot.com bubble and how they look today.

Global EM equities portfolio manager Ashish Chugh shares why he thinks EM inflation and rates fears may be overblown.

Only 10 of 30 stocks are attractively valued blue-chip stocks making up the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) today.

Chinese stocks have tumbled amid a regulatory crackdown on education and technology companies.

Everyone was eager to put 2020 behind us, yet the Covid hangover lingers.

We will touch on several topics as we go along today, beginning with the economy.

The great philosopher, John Locke, brilliantly captured the way the world works.

Our economic outlook remains constructive, though we recognize it’s still too soon to know whether the current bout of inflation is transitory. Given the potential for rate increases, particularly after the Fed’s comments in June, we continue to prefer non-investment grade bonds, as they have lower duration and higher yields.

Mental health, addiction, and pain treatment will be fundamentally transformed by psychedelic drugs over the coming decade, giving rise to a multi-billion-dollar industry with the potential to drastically improve patient outcomes across a range of indications. Investors are starting to take notice and major backers are getting involved.

In what shaped up to be a very impressive first half of the year for both the economy and stock market, stellar earnings growth has been a key ingredient.

Chief Economist Scott Brown discusses the latest market data.

It’s now official that the recession of 2020 was the shortest in history.

Recent protests offer hope that change may be right around the corner. But for now, gold and Bitcoin have helped fill the gap created by disastrously mismanaged currencies.

Let me be very clear. I believe the Federal Reserve has already made a significant policy error that can lead directly to recession. An accompanying fiscal policy error by the US Congress could compound the Fed’s error, although that remains to be seen, as it is not clear what will pass Congress.

The impacts of passive investing are not as well understood as they should be.

Even though we are in a long-running and very inflated bull market, there are value stocks to be found.

Two months. That’s how long the pandemic-triggered recession lasted, from February to April 2020, making it the shortest economic downturn in U.S. history, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research’s (NBER) Business Cycle Dating Committee.

What exactly is “transitory?”

In this video I cover 7 REITs for income and growth that subscribers to the channel asked me to cover.

Frontier markets are popular to investors that seek higher returns, and Central Asia’s Kazakhstan is regarded with particular interest.

Prices continue to climb, with the US CPI rising in June by the most since 2008.

Monetary policy is not expansionary despite widespread belief otherwise.

US inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index and others continues to surge at rates we haven’t seen in decades.

Yesterday was an interesting day.

At a minimum, the latter part of 2020 and the first half of 2021 will go down as one of the strangest psychological times for common stock investors.