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 >

July 24, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “For those clinging to the recovery narrative, I just don’t see it.” – David Rosenberg, President and Chief Economist & Strategist, Rosenberg Research Last week we took a look at coming return probabilities, which showed the expected 10-year future return [...]Read More >

July 17, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “We believe the corona crisis is the most disruptive global event since World War II, and far surpasses the trauma of the 2007-2009 Great Recession.” – A. Gary Shilling, financial analyst and commentator, Insight As you read today, keep this important point [...]Read More >

July 10, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “My experience in this business is if everyone is running in one direction and you start to run in the other, and you seem crazy, if you're right, the rewards are enormous.” – Catherine Wood, Founder, CEO, CIO, and Portfolio Manager, ARK Investment Management [...]Read More >

July 2, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “I don’t see us wanting to run through the bond market like an elephant, you know, doing things and snuffing out price signals or things like that. We just want to be there if things turn bad in the economy or if things go in a negative direction, we want to [...]Read More >

June 26, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “Retain faith that you will prevail in the end regardless of the difficulties, and at the same time confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they may be.” – Jim Collins Management Researcher, Consultant, and Author of Good to Great: [...]Read More >

June 19, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “I can’t believe there is no uproar for a policy that involves so much resource misallocation, moral hazard behavior, and price manipulation.” – David Rosenberg President and Chief Economist & Strategist of Rosenberg Research & Associates Inc. That [...]Read More >

June 12, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “We are strongly committed to using our tools to do whatever we can and for as long as it takes to provide some relief and stability.” - Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell (June 10, 2020) Last week we took a look at valuations and what they tell us about [...]Read More >

June 5, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “You will get business failures on a grand scale.” - James Bullard, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (May 12, 2020) Let’s talk about valuations. Forward price-to-earnings (P/E) sits at 22.4. Median P/E (my favorite indicator, which looks at [...]Read More >

May 29, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal Wisdom (noun): The quality or state of being wise; knowledge of what is true or right coupled with just judgment as to action; sagacity, discernment, or insight. This week you’ll find my summary notes and thoughts from Dr. Lacy Hunt’s SIC 2020 presentation. He [...]Read More >

May 22, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “The problem I have is that it’s pure fantasy to think that normalized earnings are not going to be seriously dented by the likely permanent loss of some 10 million workers in the future from what the baseline was prior to the crisis, which means lost labor [...]Read More >