November 20, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “I know now we have this big debate. Is it $2.2 trillion, $1.5 trillion? You gotta be kidding me. I mean just split the baby and move on. This is childish behavior on the part of our politicians.” – Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO, JPMorgan Chase It [...]Read More >

November 13, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “History does not repeat, but it often rhymes.” – Mark Twain JPMorgan is out this week predicting the S&P 500 Index will reach 4,500 by the end of next year. I hope they are right, but I have doubts. What might cause such a move? High stock market [...]Read More >

October 30, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better,” Theodore Roosevelt explained.  “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by [...]Read More >

October 16, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “The 60% stock / 40% bond portfolio is largely a relic of the past, with alternatives likely to become a bigger portion of investors’ portfolios over the next decade, asset management chiefs said during a panel discussion at the Milken Global Institute [...]Read More >

October 9, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal "I find it funny that people who didn’t think there was any inflation in the pipeline are now talking about stagflation. This is nothing like the 1970’s, which was a pretty dismal period, and not just because of polyester and disco." - Barry Ritholtz [...]Read More >

October 2, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “Because what most people and their countries want the most is wealth and power, and because money and credit are the biggest single influence on how wealth and power rise and decline, if you don’t understand how money and credit work, you can’t understand [...]Read More >

September 25, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “Anyone who looked only at the index of prices would see no reason to suspect any material degree of inflation, whilst anyone who looked at the total volume of bank credit and the prices of common stocks would have been convinced of the presence of an [...]Read More >

September 18, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “My metric for everything I look at is the 200-day moving average of closing prices. I’ve seen too many things go to zero, stocks and commodities. The whole trick in investing is: “How do I keep from losing everything?” If you use the 200-day moving [...]Read More >

September 11, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “We are in the midst in what we old fogeys tend to call a sell-stop avalanche. It happened before in history and most of them look like this. I know there are several theories about what has been causing the recent sharp weakness, but based on over six [...]Read More >

September 4, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “The most striking similarity between the 1920s and the 1990s bull markets is the notion that traditional measures of stock valuation have become obsolete.” – Edward Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost (via John Hussman) Welcome to September 2020. Hard to [...]Read More >

August 28, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” - From Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises Yesterday, from beautiful Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell delivered what [...]Read More >

August 21, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “The US is extremely important as it still provides the world with the most important reserve currency. Once faith in that currency declines and the US dollar enters a decisive multi-year bear cycle, hell could break loose.” – Felix Zulauf, Founder, Zulauf [...]Read More >

August 14, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “It’s a battle between the Fed’s $750 billion SPV to buy corporate IG and HY bonds and those who don’t have access to this free money. And funds, like mine, are buying what the Fed is buying. Thus, the oversubscription of new offerings. ETFs must put the [...]Read More >

August 7, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.” “In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.” - Benjamin Graham, “the Father of Value Investing” and Author of The [...]Read More >

July 31, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal News flash: The 10-year Treasury yield falls to 0.52% after record GDP contraction. The yield on the 30-year Treasury bond was lower at 1.18%. The bond market has it right. Every weekday, an Axios Markets email hits my inbox. This morning’s post caught my [...]Read More >