One of the few things on which just about everybody can agree during this election season is that our elected officials in Washington, DC have taken on too much debt on our behalf. Voters part company on what to do about it, but most agree it’s a problem that’s not going away. Deciding to borrow […]
In yesterday’s press conference, Steve Liesman from CNBC asked a highly pertinent question of Chairman Bernanke. Steve asked whether the explicit focus on employment meant that the Fed was now willing to tolerate a higher inflation rate than would otherwise be the case. Bernanke answered predictably by noting that the Fed by law has a dual […]
There are some signs that the hedge fund industry is moving towards a more appropriate capital base. Leo Kolivakis, who covers hedge funds and other classes of investment for Canadian pension funds, noted that outflows from hedge funds have picked up recently. Mediocre returns delivered at great expense for several years may be starting to focus […]
It might strike some a hyperbole to accuse the government of stealing taxpayers money – up there with the conspiracy theories around JFK’s assassination or the staging of the Apollo 11 moon landing in a warehouse in Hollywood. But it’s just the sorry Math confronting savers, most recently highlighted in a CNBC article yesterday. Conventionally, lowering […]
Natural gas is +6% today, in part no doubt because stocks are being rebuilt at slightly faster than over the past five years, according to the Energy Information Agency (EIA). Of course a mild winter like last year will lead to another excess of supply, although the continued switching from coal to gas in energy production […]
Over the past few days a few not very surprising things have happened. From Der Spiegel (as reported in the FT) German Chancellor Merkel has concluded that Greece must stay in the Euro and is now focused on ensuring this happens. Although many people (including apparently a majority of German voters) believe Greece should be […]
Sell in May and Go Away is an easily remembered rule that worked very well for the past two years. Last year from April 30 to August 31, the S&P 500 lost 11%. Over more than fifty years it’s been sound advice 47% of the time so slightly less effective than a coin flip. However, […]
I thought this was a pretty balanced and investor-oriented piece: http://www.finalternatives.com/node/21480
Only 25% of Germans think Greece should remain in the Euro or receive further additional EU support, according to a Financial Times/Harris poll. Holding opinions unburdened by the need to implement them is an indulgence afforded voters in all democracies. It feels good to punish the tax-dodging Greeks by kicking them out. But if instead […]
Towards the end of last year we felt there was an interesting opportunity to be long equities hedged with a short position in the Euro. Our thinking was that equities were attractively priced as long as a crisis was averted, and most of the bad things we could imagine would either begin in Europe (i.e. […]
