Guild’s Basic Needs Index
5G: It’s A Big Deal
The rollout of 5G wireless internet presents an enormous economic opportunity, since it will involve the construction and deployment of hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure, and ultimately enable the creation of trillions of dollars’ worth of economic value. The companies that provide that infrastructure will be some
Market Summary–6 February 2020
U.S. and Global Stocks Big events are afoot in the world. The coronavirus outbreak is ongoing, and continues to grow, albeit with little direct impact outside of mainland China. Stock markets in the developed world have apparently resumed their advance, with the U.S. again touching close to all-time highs. Even
Why You Need A Financial Plan
Financial worries sometimes create stress, and often that stress is unnecessary. Organization and a little disciplined thinking would help dispel it. With a financial plan, your goals come into clearer view, and so do the strategies you need to implement in order to reach them. Starting to think about the
“The Best Way to Predict the Future Is To Invent It”: Dominic Cummings’ Push For a U.K. DARPA
Over the past few years, a new movement has emerged in many countries around the world, taking different forms in different places, and often labeled by the news media with the deceptively simple term “populism.” However, that term doesn’t capture some of the most important aspects of the historic process
Market Summary — 30 January 2020
U.S. and Global Stocks Thus far, global markets have essentially shrugged off any major risks from the outbreak of 2019-nCoV, the designation for the new SARS-like coronavirus outbreak in China. We note that markets especially in the U.S. remain in an overbought condition, and vulnerable to a correction — either
Don’t Make These Common Estate-Planning Errors
Estate planning is a critical process for investors as they consider the transfer of assets to their heirs, and there are some big mistakes that are easy to make if you lack sound estate-planning advice. That could give your heirs big headaches when you’re gone — the exact opposite of
Repo Madness and Fed Liquidity
Last September, after the crisis in the overnight repo markets, we wrote: “The recent funding stresses that drove U.S. overnight repo rates to spike point out actions that the U.S. Federal Reserve will need to take over the coming year to ensure liquidity. Accounting for organic growth in liquidity needs,
Coronavirus: A Threat to Global Stock Markets?
Last week, in our Market Summary, we commented: “A correction could come in one of two forms — either a boring, sideways grind lasting several months, or a sharp decline of 4–8%, coincident with some appropriate externality, followed by a renewed uptrend. The recent outbreak of a SARS-like coronavirus in
Market Summary — 23 January 2020
A recent piece of analysis of U.S. markets that we read alluded to Waiting For Godot, the mid-century play by Irish writer Samuel Beckett in which the two hapless lead characters are waiting for someone (Godot) who never arrives. After a remarkable period of low volatility and rapid appreciation, sparked
“It Wasn’t Me, Ma — It Was the Algorithm!”
Apple [NASDAQ: AAPL] got pilloried on social media in November, several months into the rollout of the new Apple Card (managed by Goldman Sachs [NYSE: GS]). A tech influencer (the creator of the popular programming language “Ruby On Rails”) called out AAPL for giving him a much larger credit limit than his
Are Shrinking Stock Markets A Problem?
We recently read a piece in Bloomberg on a notable long-term trend: the U.K. stock market is shrinking. Looking back to 2016, John Authers notes: “While the index has risen more than 23%, the total value of shares has increased by only 2.7%. The reason is the ebbing importance of
Market Summary: January 16, 2020
We may be entering into the last stage of the post-crisis bull market, likely in 2021. Most analysts see very modest appreciation in global stock markets this year; in the markets we favor, mentioned above, we’re looking for more gains than the consensus expects. We are watching carefully for economic
Researchers Build Biological Nanobots
Here’s a new entry in the “robot apocalypse” file (though with lots of alternate happy endings). We recently read in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about a team of researchers from Tufts, Harvard, and the University of Vermont who successfully created microscopic biological machines, entirely out of
Guild’s Quarterly Conference Call — A Preview
On Thursday, January 23, at 10 AM PST, Guild will host its conference call for the first quarter of 2020, and in this week’s letter, we’ll give you a rundown of some of what we’ll be discussing. You can register for the call here. We always love to hear from
Market Summary: January 9, 2020
We mentioned in last week’s Market Summary that we saw heightened terrorism risks in 2020, and right on cue, the next day the U.S. assassinated the leader of Iran’s Quds Force. Iran responded with missile strikes against U.S. facilities in Iraq. The risk of regional destabilization was, briefly, on everyone’s
Socially Responsible Investing: Can the Ratings Be Trusted?
Globally, $3 trillion in institutional assets (perhaps more) are tracking ESG scores — numbers that purport to distill and quantize companies’ performance against environmental, social, and governance standards. We reported to you back in November about interesting research showing better stock performance by companies with higher gender diversity among their
