Guild’s Basic Needs Index
A Tale of Two Chinas
The skeptics and haters of the current bull market have spent the last eight years finding reasons and justifications for their skepticism. One of the favorite reasons for pessimism has been China. Sometimes China has been a geopolitical boogeyman, with journalists fretting about China’s rise on the world stage and
U.S. Markets, Japan, and Europe
Market Summary U.S. Markets, Japan, and Europe U.S. markets continue ahead, logging one of their longest-ever periods without a 5% correction. We do not know what the catalyst for such a correction will be, and neither does anyone else, but there are plenty of potential culprits that everyone continues to
What Will Push Stocks Higher?
Productivity Growth Will Push Stocks Higher After a long slump, productivity growth is accelerating again — and the reasons for the acceleration further reinforce our view that we are in a late, bullish phase of the economic and market cycle, with more upside to come for stocks. As we have
Big Tech’s Regulatory Reckoning Coming Soon?
Big Tech’s Regulatory Reckoning Coming Soon? Probably Not 2017 has been a year for the big, dominant U.S. technology companies: the advertising duopoly of Alphabet [NASDAQ: GOOG] and Facebook [NASDAQ: FB]; the e-commerce juggernaut of Amazon [NASDAQ: AMZN]; and the most valuable consumer products brand on the planet, Apple [NASDAQ:
Who Is Going To Be The Leading Global Power by 2050?
Chinese As A “Leading Global Power” by 2050 — And How China’s Tech Giants Feature In That Equation With Chinese internet stocks “as hot as the sun” according to one commentator, companies such as Alibaba [NYSE: BABA], Baidu [NASDAQ: BIDU], Tencent [Hong Kong: 700], JD.com [NASDAQ: JD], and TAL Education
Why The World Is Buying Japanese Stocks
Japan’s Prime Minister Cements Power and Drives Japanese Stocks Higher On September 28, Japan’s main political opposition announced that it wouldn’t be fielding any candidates in the snap election that had been called by Prime Minister Abe. The Japanese stock market had been having an unexceptional year, lagging other global
Are Markets “Efficient”?
What Richard Thaler Has Taught Us About Economics… and Markets On October 9, this year’s economics Nobel winner was announced: Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago. Mostly, the advances made by economists who win the Nobel can seem a little abstruse, but Mr Thaler’s contribution is different. To understand
Is Internet Marketing Going Away?
Internet Marketing’s Growth Story Is Still Strong Last week we commented on some of the social and political pressure that has recently been building against the giants of U.S. internet tech: primarily Amazon [NASDAQ: AMZN], Facebook [NASDAQ: FB], and Alphabet [NASDAQ: GOOG]. Regulators are accusing them of using opaque financial
Is E-Commerce an Employment Wrecking Ball?
Is E-Commerce an Employment Wrecking Ball? Nope: It Creates More, Better-Paying Jobs and Boosts Productivity After strong stock-market performance in the year to date, several big U.S. tech firms have begun to receive some negative attention from the public, as well as from regulators and politicians. Alphabet [NASDAQ: GOOG] and
Which market could more than double before the bull is over?
Why Emerging Markets Could More Than Double Before the Bull Is Over Back in April, we drew attention to the ongoing rally in emerging markets that began early in 2016, corrected sharply at the time of the U.S. election last November, and then took off again as fears of a
Is brick-and-mortar retail doomed?
Is Pure E-Commerce Really An Unstoppable Juggernaut? Why the Future May Be Different Than You Expect The narrative of the total and relentless dominance of e-commerce over brick-and-mortar retail is beginning to break down. Above, we wrote about the big Chinese tech firms, and how they’re leveraging consumer data to
Videogames: A Theme That’s Just Beginning
We’ve written several times this year on themes related to videogames — trends we believe show that the 2017 outperformance of many domestic and foreign videogame companies are not a flash in the pan, but the beginning of a period of secular growth. This week we’ll provide a brief summary
The Bitcoin Fork
Bitcoin’s wild gyrations have this year become even wilder, driven largely by an ongoing “civil war” within the commu-nity of coders and miners who make up the cryptocurrency’s ecosystem. So what’s the nature of this civil war, what are the stakes, and what might the consequences be? On
Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Probably Not
Digital assets such as Bitcoin, Ether, and others have appreciated so much in 2017 that their interest and appeal are irresistible — not just to speculators, but increasingly to institutional investors. Anyone who has not participated in the rally is faced with a conundrum. At every step of the way,
A Trade War With China? That’s Already Been Happening For Decades
A Trade War With China? That’s Already Been Happening For Decades During last year’s U.S. presidential campaign, we began reading discus-sions about the possible effects of a trade war with China. Since the new administration took office, such dis-cussions have become ubiquitous. But even last year, we were left
