March 1, 2019 By Steve Blumenthal “Optimism is highly valued, socially and in the market; people and firms reward the providers of dangerously misleading information more than they reward truth tellers. One of the lessons of the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession is that there are [...]Read More >

February 22, 2019 By Steve Blumenthal “The markets believed in December that the Fed was on the precipice of making a huge policy error – and the central bank pulled back.  End of story… From my lens, the Fed had already overtightened and recession risks for this year are elevated and on the [...]Read More >

February 15, 2019 By Steve Blumenthal "We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness." - Daniel Kahneman It’s been a fantastic equity market rally but keep your lights on, from a statistical perspective, odds favor a retest of the December low. I came across the [...]Read More >

February 8, 2019 By Steve Blumenthal “He went from being “Pragmatic Powell” to a “Powell Put.” But I do worry about people buying the dip because it does remind me a little of how the credit crisis developed with sub-prime starting to crack in 2007 it cracked down to $80 and people bought that [...]Read More >

February 1, 2019 By Steve Blumenthal “It's 'pretty obvious' the Fed is moving to the whims of the markets.” - Art Cashin Managing Director, Director of Floor Operations UBS Financial Services Inc. “It is impossible for Jay Powell to be more dominated by market-world than he is today. Even in [...]Read More >

January 25, 2019 By Steve Blumenthal “More money than fools or more fools than money. When there is more money than fools asset prices go up. When there are more fools than money, asset prices go down.” – Louis-Vincent Gave, Founding Partner & CEO, Gavekal Research At last March’s Mauldin [...]Read More >

January 18, 2019 By Steve Blumenthal “Overoptimism and overconfidence are two well-known psychological traits of our species. They are particularly dangerous in the late stages of an economic cycle where these terrible twins result in investors overestimating return and underestimating risk – a [...]Read More >

January 11, 2019 By Steve Blumenthal [Trump tweets, Xi Jinping, Global debt, the ECB Greenspan Put and Powell QT, He won’t do the same damn thing] "We didn’t start the fire It was always burning Since the world’s been turning We didn’t start the fire No we didn’t light it But we tried to [...]Read More >

January 4, 2019 By Steve Blumenthal “History is on our side.  There have been 13 Fed tightening cycles since 1950. Ten of these landed the economy in recession, and neither the consensus nor the Fed staff saw them coming when they actually started. So before knowing anything else, the fact that [...]Read More >

December 28, 2018 By Steve Blumenthal “Monetary tightening by central banks is like trying to pull a brick across a rough surface with elastic: nothing happens; still nothing happens;  then it leaps up and hits you in the face.” – Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph On My Radar is a letter [...]Read More >

December 21, 2018 By Steve Blumenthal “I saw her today at the reception A glass of wine in her hand I knew she was gonna meet her connection At her feet was her footloose man You can't always get what you want You can't always get what you want You can't always get what you want But if you [...]Read More >

December 14, 2018 By Steve Blumenthal “I think we’re going to see a lot more of what we just saw, which is a lot more volatility, it’s really easy to say ‘I’m really bullish’ or ‘I’m really bearish.’ I kind of see a two-sided market.” “I think in the next year it will be, from where we are [...]Read More >

December 7, 2018 By Steve Blumenthal “The training wheels are coming off. Next week, the European Central Bank will conduct its final meeting of 2018 and is widely expected to announce the cessation of its QE asset purchase program. The ECB began buying sovereign bonds in 2015 and added [...]Read More >

November 30, 2018 By Steve Blumenthal “When it comes to investing, we never know what the future holds or where we are going, but we should do all we can to know where we stand, since the current position of the cycle has powerful implications for how we should cope with its possible future.” – [...]Read More >

November 16, 2018 By Steve Blumenthal "All I want out of life is that when I walk down the street, folks will say, 'There goes the greatest hitter that ever lived.'" – Ted Williams Ted Williams hit .344 lifetime and won six American League batting titles, despite losing five years to military [...]Read More >