If you own emerging market stocks, you know it’s been painful this year. The chart below from McKinsey shows just how wide the divergence has been between emerging markets and the stellar S&P 500. Source: McKinsey Global Institute To say that emerging markets are out of favor now is a bit like saying water seems […]
Julie Won
The 2-Minute Thought: Geopolitical Risk Declining?
Believe it or not, attention to geopolitical risk seems to be declining — in spite of trade tensions, saber-rattling between the U.S. and China, and emerging markets turmoil. That at least is according to BlackRock and its quantitative tool, the BlackRock Geopolitical Risk Indicator (BGRI). The BGRI attempts to measure the amount of attention geopolitical […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Snow-capped Mountains, Salt, and Lithium…
There are a few things to know about landing in La Paz, Bolivia, as my family and I did recently. One is that La Paz is the highest capital in the world, so when you land at the airport at 13,300 feet above sea level, you feel it. Breathing is harder. The air is so […]
The 2-Minute Thought: How Big Can a Company Get?
A recent column in The Economist suggested that Apple is testing the natural limits of company size. It’s not a new idea. It seems natural to expect that something would happen eventually after a company gets so big and dominant – something like market saturation, competition, backlash, missteps, or product obsolescence. Every age has had its […]
The 2-Minute Thought: Mid-Year Market Review
The pink chart below from last Friday’s Financial Times tells us a lot about where we are in markets now: Source: Financial Times The indomitable FANG or FAANG stocks remain indomitable (that’s Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Google – plus Amazon if you do the double A). Though there was a brief moment of doubt earlier in […]
The 2-Minute Thought: When to Heed Advice from Others
In her 2013 book, Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed, and How We Can Stick to the Plan, Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino describes an experiment she did with Don Moore, a colleague at the University of California, Berkeley. In the study, participants were shown pictures of people and asked to estimate their weight. […]
