From the lows in early 2009, it has been up, up and away for Wall Street. The market has not suffered a decline of 20% (the Bear market definition) in over nine years. However, this market has not been loved. Stock prices have risen less on an annual basis than the average Bull Market and […]
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What We’re Hearing from Management…
It’s been another interesting season of listening to corporate earnings calls, and getting management’s take on their companies, industries and the world at large. What have we learned? Here are a few selected themes: Underlying demand in the U.S. is good. As hard as it is to generalize, things look pretty good for U.S. companies. […]
Cleaning up the World’s Oceans…
In the 1967 movie The Graduate, recent college graduate Dustin Hoffman is advised to pursue a career in plastics. As it turns out, this was probably good career advice. As the chart below shows, the production of plastics globally has increased more than 20-fold since then. But what has made plastic an ideal input to […]
The 2-Minute Thought: When the Robots Come, Human Hearts Will Matter
In a recent speech called “The Future of Work,” Bank of England Governor Mark Carney addressed how artificial intelligence, automation, interconnectivity, and other elements of the Fourth Industrial Revolution will change the way we work. The way we work already has changed enormously. In Carney’s words, economies are being reorganized into “a series of distributed […]
The 2-Minute Thought: Pursuing Outside Interests
In a 2017 editorial, David Epstein and Malcolm Gladwell noted that most scientists have about the same number of hobbies as the general public, but that scientists inducted into national academies tend to have more – and Nobel Prize winners still more. Nobel laureates are at least 22 times more likely than others to have […]
When ‘Cash- Strapped’ Takes on New Meaning…
When you think ‘siege’ you think of the Middle Ages and months of castles surrounded and stalemated armies. Sieges don’t happen in the modern era. Well a siege actually did happen in Sarajevo (Bosnia) between 1992 and 1995. The Serbs completely surrounded the city and pounded Sarajevo daily with bombs and sniper fire from the […]
“Once A Year Go Somewhere You Have Never Been Before” – The Dalai Lama
I am the kind of person who needs to go to a place and see it, then I can better understand the history and current events. In the recent past I have been to Iran, the five ‘Stans, the South Caucasus and this summer, the Balkans. All of them are now a little more understandable. […]
Our Limitations… Our Habits…
Not too long ago, The Economist wrote an article about an academic paper that I’ve since learned is called “Evidence for a conserved quantity in human mobility” by Laura Alessandretti and Andrea Baronchelli, both in the Mathematics Department at City University of London, and Sune Lehmann at the DTU Technical University of Denmark. If you […]
When Will The Party End?…
By almost any measure, the U.S. economy is in great shape. At 3.9%, the U.S. unemployment rate is at historic lows. Inflation remains at reasonably low levels and economic growth, as measured by GDP, just hit its highest quarterly rate since 2014. But economies have a nasty tendency to go through boom and bust cycles […]
The 2-Minute Thought: Physicists and Poets in Investing — Revisited
In a 2014 talk, MIT physicist and novelist Alan Lightman said that in childhood he loved both writing and science. He wrote dozens of poems exploring a wide range of subjects and experiences and was fascinated by how words could make you feel. He also scavenged for resistors, capacitors, wires, and test tubes so he […]
The 2-Minute Thought: Beware of Creep
Winner take all. Growth at any price. In this kind of environment, there are at least three temptations for value-minded investors. One is to give in and buy those high-priced, go-go momentum stocks that have frustrated you for so long. Another is the opposite — to fall into value traps. That is, in a high-priced […]
The 2-Minute Thought: Airlines
Airline stocks are underperforming this year. The big three U.S. carriers — Delta, United, and American – are up a market cap-weighted average of 1.4%, while the S&P 500 is up 5.3%. And that is after including Wednesday’s big 8.8% jump in United after it raised its profit forecast. United now stands out as the […]
