June 22, 2018 By Steve Blumenthal “The bottom line is that the wisdom of investing passively depends, ironically, on some people investing actively. When active investing is dismissed totally and all active efforts cease, passive investing will become imprudent and opportunities for superior [...]Read More >

June 15, 2018 By Steve Blumenthal “So I think you’ll see rates go up and stocks go up in tandem at the end of the year.” “If you asked me to think of similar time periods, I’d say 1987 in the U.S., I’m not saying we are going to have a crash.  It was a time when you had a budget deficit and you [...]Read More >

June 8, 2018 By Steve Blumenthal - Rudyard Kipling It was Kipling’s poem. A reflection.  A smile. And yes, a tear. It was my mom whispering. If I could share some advice to the young CFA, an advisor, my client, my friend, my kids and again to myself… that poem. So much in that poem. This [...]Read More >

June 1, 2018 By Steve Blumenthal “… [T]he trigger for a crisis could be anything if the system as a whole is unstable. Moreover, the size of the trigger event need not bear any relation to the systemic outcome. The lesson is that policymakers should be focused less on identifying [...]Read More >

May 25, 2018 By Steve Blumenthal “If I were trying to create a deflationary bust, I would do exact exactly what the world’s central bankers have been doing the last six years. I shudder to think that the malinvestment that occurred over this period. Corporate debt has soared, but most of it has [...]Read More >

May 18, 2018 By Steve Blumenthal "The most important item over time in valuation is obviously interest rates… If interest rates are destined to be at low levels, it makes any stream of earnings from investments worth more money. The bogey is always what government bonds yield." - Warren Buffett [...]Read More >

May 11, 2018 By Steve Blumenthal “At a time when the unemployment rate is well below full employment and inflation is accelerating, the Federal Reserve (Fed) is already on a course to tighten policy in order to cool the economy. Fiscal stimulus has only served to elevate concerns about economic [...]Read More >

May 4, 2018 By Steve Blumenthal "Excesses in one direction will lead to an opposite excess in the other direction." "Markets are strongest when they are broad and weakest when they narrow to a handful of blue-chip names." "Bull markets are more fun than bear markets." - Bob Farrell (Rules #2, [...]Read More >

April 27, 2018 By Steve Blumenthal “What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expect generally happens." Benjamin Disraeli We’ve been talking about a 3% yield on the 10-year Treasury as a line in the sand.  It may well be.  The important technical number is 3.07%.  A break higher and 4% is [...]Read More >

April 20, 2018 By Steve Blumenthal “A Minsky moment is a sudden major collapse of asset values, which is part of the credit cycle or business cycle. Such moments occur because long periods of prosperity and increasing value of investments lead to increasing speculation using borrowed [...]Read More >

April 13, 2018 By Steve Blumenthal “… I think Cohn resigning, was basically (telling us) that trade protectionists have taken over the economic thought process at the White House.  And I think that's really disturbing.” - David Rosenberg China’s President Xi Jinping, in a speech this week, [...]Read More >

April 6, 2018 By Steve Blumenthal “The deflationary period we’ve been in has come to an end.” – Louis-Vincent Gave, Founding Partner & CEO, Gavekal Research China and Trump escalated the Trade War fist fight this week and the markets are having trouble digesting the dire news.  Is Trump [...]Read More >

March 29, 2018 By Steve Blumenthal “I’m bullish on commodities because we are late cycle…  You can argue how late we are in the cycle but we are late cycle. The bond bulls will argue there is more room to run, but nobody is going to say we are in the first inning or the third inning of an [...]Read More >

March 23, 2018 By Steve Blumenthal “There are two bubbles: We have a stock market bubble and we have a bond market bubble… What’s behind the bubble?  Well, the fact is that essentially we’re beginning to run an ever-larger government deficit. As a share of GDP debt has been rising very [...]Read More >

March 16, 2018 By Steve Blumenthal “A period of stability induces behavioral responses that erode margins of safety, reduce liquidity, raise cash flow commitments relative to income and profits, and raise the price of risky relative to safe assets – all combining to weaken the ability of the [...]Read More >