This Year In Review And The Year Ahead 2015 was a year of divergences. Developed markets outperformed developing markets, services outperformed manufacturing, and commodity-related companies and economies underperforming everything else. Broader indices often served to conceal these divergences, with some software-related names, for example, far outpacing the performance of the Read more…
100 Million Times Faster? Quantum Computing Is In the House Last Tuesday, the Google Research Blog announced the publication of a new paper by Alphabet’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) Quantum AI team, reporting on the results of experiments run on the quantum computer system that GOOG operates jointly with NASA. That Read more…
Market Summary As we survey the investment horizon for 2016 the picture that we see is not highly attractive. Economic and Financial Fundamentals: Slightly Positive On a fundamental basis, the world is growing at a modest rate, and the return to a big deflationary trend in North America, Europe, or Read more…
Sunnis, Shi’ites, and Surprises After almost five years of civil war, the conflict in Syria has spilled over to Europe in the form of an ongoing refugee crisis, and now through the terrorist attacks in Paris — which, according to Islamic State claims, came as retaliation for French airstrikes. Now, Read more…
Tactical Views on the Year’s End and Beyond With just a little more than a month remaining to year’s end, we’re reflecting on the market’s performance thus far as we strategize the final push and begin to think about how to plan for 2016. Two themes stand out for us: Read more…
Real Estate: The Lay of the Land Stocks and real estate both suffered sharp declines during the Great Recession, and both have recovered in the more-than-six years since the downturn officially ended. Data Source: NCREIF, Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, Bloomberg The graph above shows the relative performance of Read more…
Some good news for small banks. Financials are some of the first beneficiaries in investors’ minds as they contemplate the imminent end of the Fed’s zero-interest-rate policy, but not all financials are created equal. We believe that the largest financial institutions will continue to face intense regulatory scrutiny and that Read more…
It May Not Be a “Sharing Economy,” But It’s Still Transformative We read recently about a new startup in the “sharing economy,” a French company called “BlaBlaCar” — an improvement on its original name that would make sense only to French speakers, “Covoitourage.” The shift is appropriate, since the ride-sharing Read more…
More Light in Dark PoolsDark pools are private trading venues, off the main exchanges, mostly run by large brokerage houses (although some are independent). On public exchanges such as the New York Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ, bids and offers are public. In dark pools, however, details of bids and Read more…
The Case for GoldRecently we have been hearing from some of our old friends from the gold world. Except for the occasional trading position, we have not been positive on gold for about four years. Our attitude has recently changed. A few weeks ago, and last week as well, we Read more…
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