investing

The rumour making the rounds today is that these two paragraphs in a recent Ambrose Evans-Pritchard piece in the Telegraph are what were the final straw for Syriza that cost Yanis Varoufakis his job. I don’t know whether there is any basis…

The Absolute Return Letter, July 2015 “In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.” Mark Zuckerberg Greece on the brink A Greek, an Irishman and a Portuguese walk…

The situation in Greece is not about Greece at all. It is about enforcing an economic framework onto all Eurozone countries. And because the policy goal is primarily about enforcing this economic framework everywhere in the eurozone, there…

The abrupt spike in interest rates from mid-April to mid-May is very unlikely to be the beginning of something much bigger and much more likely to be the sort of occasional panic attack that Japan has seen so many of in recent years.

A typical portfolio will almost certainly not deliver the required returns over the next decade. If ‘typical’ means a 60/40 approach, as already mentioned, then 2-4% annualised returns are what can realistically be expected. If ‘typical’…

Yesterday I made up the phrase “The Four Horsemen of this rally” when discussing the bull market rally with a colleague. What I was trying to get at was the unsustainable nature of a divergence between top line revenue growth and the…

Going forward, equity markets are likely to have a much bigger impact on the economy than has been the case in the past. This is a simple conclusion derived from the fact that total equity market value today is 1.2x GDP. 35 years ago, when…

This past week, I have been focusing on the US economy and the Fed’s reaction function. I would summarize my view as positive about the cyclical trajectory of the US economy but concerned about so-called secular stagnation due to high…

The title of this post is what the Fed wants us to believe. It wants us to believe that it is prepared to raise interest rates this year but that it will increase them slowly by assessing the data, hiking once and re-assessing, and then…

There is definitely a technology bubble brewing. And it will end badly. Some people are going to get rich though - and not necessarily undeservedly so. Some thoughts below I am going to make this very short. Valuations in the private…