When we think about the challenges facing an investor today, the big problems, the things we worry about that could cause a lot more harm than some interest rate hikes, are mostly outside the United States. China is prominent this weekend because of demonstrations against their zero-COVID policies. The Chinese people appear to be pretty well fed up with the [...]
Remember, your goal in investing isn't to earn average returns; you want to do better than average. Thus your thinking has to be better than that of others - both more powerful and at a higher level. Since others may be smart, well-informed and highly computerized, you must find an edge they don't have. You must think of something they [...]
(with additional contributions from Margie Fernandez; edited by Joe Calhoun) The Net Worth of Non-financial Corporate Business declined slightly in Q1 2017 according to the Federal Reserve’s Financial Accounts of the United States (Z1). The revised quarterly figures suggest that economic net worth eased to $23.62 trillion after a record high $23.69 trillion in Q4 2016. That likely relates to [...]
The theme for Single Country ETFs over the last month is either countries that produce a lot of natural resources (commodities) or Countries in which sane people don't invest. Okay, maybe sanity isn't the proper metric but surely investors who can't afford to take a loss shouldn't be investing in Russia, Peru or Turkey, all three of which make the [...]
The title is a shorthand way of saying that the most recent performance of the economy isn't predictive of the future performance of the stock market. The bottom line is that GDP growth today doesn't necessarily mean stock price growth today - GDP growth and stock returns are not highly correlated. In fact, some analysis suggests that they are negatively [...]
It wasn't a pretty week for stocks globally. Almost every major market was down - one prominent exception was Japan - and the minor ones were down more. China experienced a 6.5% hiccup mid-week that everyone seemed to want to see as, at least, the beginning of the end of that bull market so it probably was nothing more than [...]
Home country bias is the tendency for investors to focus more on their domestic economy and markets. For most of the people reading this the US markets are home and with the Dow breaking 17,000 this past week the US is certainly getting a lot of attention. And it deserves it I guess considering the huge run up in US [...]
US stocks, based on long term valuation techniques, are the most expensive in the world. Expected returns over the next decade, again based on long term valuation techniques, are somewhere south of 5% real and with inflation very low, nominal returns won't be much better. At Alhambra, we believe that, at best, the S&P 500 is uninteresting and at worst [...]
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