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 >

November 9, 2018 By Steve Blumenthal “… [W]e cannot do everything ourselves; different people are more capable in different matters… [I]n cases where we ourselves cannot be present, the vicarious faith of friends is substituted; and he who impairs that confidence, attacks the common bulwark of [...]Read More >

November 2, 2018 By Steve Blumenthal “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” – Michael Jordan The [...]Read More >

October 26, 2018 By Steve Blumenthal “It is essential for everyone to understand the logical sequence of events that makes these (big debt crises) all play out all the same.” – Ray Dalio “Years of monumental Quantitative Easing / Negative Interest Rates monetary policy affected the behavioral [...]Read More >

October 19, 2018 By Steve Blumenthal “A generational opportunity hidden in plain sight. Its status of loneliness and ‘vox clamantis in deserto’ (a voice crying out in the wilderness) makes for potential outsized returns.” – Francesco Filia Plan 1: Buy-hold-rebalance. Buy lowest fee index funds [...]Read More >

October 12, 2018 By Steve Blumenthal “I want to reiterate my headline: managing debt crises is all about spreading out the pain of the bad debts, and this can almost always be done well if one’s debts are in one’s own currency. The biggest risks are typically not from the debts themselves, but [...]Read More >

October 5, 2018 By Steve Blumenthal “Typically the worst debt bubbles are not accompanied by high and rising inflation, but by asset price inflation financed by debt growth. That is because central banks make the mistake of accommodating debt growth because they are focused on inflation and/or [...]Read More >

September 28, 2018 By Steve Blumenthal “The key to handling debt crises well lies in policy makers’ knowing how to use their levers well and having the authority that they need to do so, knowing at what rate per year the burdens will have to be spread out, and who will benefit and who will suffer [...]Read More >

September 21, 2018 By Steve Blumenthal “I am writing this on the tenth anniversary of the 2008 financial crisis in order to offer the perspective of an investor who navigated that crisis well because I had developed a template for understanding how all debt crises work. I am sharing that template [...]Read More >

September 14, 2018 By Steve Blumenthal “Crashes are never caused by poor earnings or lower economic growth. Those things cause recessions, but they do not cause crashes. One thing, and one thing only, can cause a crash: forced selling.” – Matt Maley, The Real Reason for the 1987 Market [...]Read More >

September 7, 2018 By Steve Blumenthal “[A] grain falling on a red spot can, by domino-like action, cause sliding at other nearby red spots.” – Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity, Why Catastrophes Happen I woke up early last Saturday morning and found John Mauldin’s Thoughts from the Frontline newsletter on [...]Read More >

August 31, 2018 By Steve Blumenthal “The best insurance policy against missing big market moves is to have more than one online brokerage account.” – Barron’s, March 11, 2000 If you feel it appropriate, share this piece with your client(s).  It's about late cycles, investor behavior and risk [...]Read More >

August 24, 2018 By Steve Blumenthal "With solid household and business confidence, healthy levels of job creation, rising incomes, and fiscal stimulus arriving, there is good reason to expect that this strong performance will continue….” – Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell in Jackson [...]Read More >