Cash holdings may provide comfort, but inflation diminishes the value of uninvested cash over time. Outside of purchase delays and product substitutes, there is little more consumers can do to directly address inflation. Investors, on the other hand, have a range of options to address that potential drag. The greater the expected return of a […]
Wall Street loves itself a forecast. Fulfilling that want, there are groups of folks whose business it is to estimate the future paths of most meaningful financial metrics. Regular readers know we don’t place too much stock, as it were, on market or macroeconomic prognostications. As generally unreliable as they might be, though, we don’t […]
So long as one did not carry too substantial an amount of interest rate risk in portfolios, markets provided a solid foundation for generally positive returns over the past quarter and year. While fixed income returns have yet to register the now higher yields on offer (recall that yields up = price down in bonds), […]
While it’s understandable that investors may get excited about future prospects of new industries and business models, that enthusiasm may need to be tempered when it comes to the associated investment cases. Early investors may see substantial gains from the immense risks they took on when potentially grand success was merely imagined. But even later […]
It’s not rare that we sit scratching our heads at obvious contradictions expressed by investment markets. But that generally is not because obviously opposing opinions are surprising. After all, any individual trade requires that the buyer and seller have opposite opinions on whether to hold a particular security. That’s not a paradox…it’s a market. But […]
Over the four-plus decades since Americans last braced against a high-inflation environment, investors have seen interest rates sink to fresh lows and rise to lower peaks with each successive economic cycle. Rates are well off recent depths on account of ongoing efforts to ease upward price pressures, bringing positive and negative impacts along with: Listen […]
