January 17, 2014 By Steve Blumenthal Things are not always as they seem.  In this business, it really is a game of opposites.  Today the market is expensive by most measures.  This is a confusing topic for many and there is always someone who says the market is cheap.  Who to believe?  What [...]Read More >

January 10, 2014 By Steve Blumenthal In this week’s On My Radar, I share the following: Asset Class Returns – An Interesting Look at Annual Returns (best to worst) With All Due Respect – An advisor’s response to last week's On My Radar Time to Pick a Ladder – by Blaine Robbins Trade [...]Read More >

S&P 500 Index 1831 By Steve Blumenthal January 3, 2014 There have been just three times since 1995 that Investor Crowd Sentiment (overall investor confidence in the stock market) has registered a higher bullish reading than today.  To shout caution would be an understatement. In this [...]Read More >

December 13, 2013 By Steve Blumenthal I was in Scottsdale, Arizona this week presenting at the IMN 18th Annual Global Indexing and ETFs Conference.  Goldman Sachs was the lead sponsor and all of the big industry players were there.  The content was particularly rich this year.  It was a two and [...]Read More >

December 6, 2013 By Steve Blumenthal It was a rough call with an advisor friend.  Corporate profits are on the rise and he is of the view that those profits will continue rising thus proclaiming, “we are in a unique new period”.  I’m of the view that he’s wrong.  Boy - do we all want to be [...]Read More >

November 29, 2013 By Steve Blumenthal Today I share our UK partner, Niels Jensen’s, November client letter.  I always enjoy Niels thinking and particularly enjoyed this letter.  It begins, “In his masterpiece The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes referred to [...]Read More >

November 22, 2013 By Steve Blumenthal Each week it is the same routine. As I read through a diverse pool of research my head clicks, "doesn't matter, doesn't matter, matters." Who are the players at the table (prop desks, market makers, hedge funds, pension managers, foreigners, individuals, [...]Read More >

November 15, 2013 By Steve Blumenthal I’m in San Diego this week speaking at the Bloomberg ETF Master Class Conference– an interesting group of advisors seeking further knowledge on trading ETFs.  Throughout the conference, I kept thinking about being in the midst of a speculative spike in the [...]Read More >

November 8, 2013 By Steve Blumenthal “The task of leadership is not to put greatness into people, but to elicit it, for the greatness is there already.” John Buchan “If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulder of giants.” Isaac Newton I’m in Denver this [...]Read More >

October 25, 2013 By Steve Blumenthal Can you feel it?  I feel it and I feel fine.  Investor Optimism is rising once again and there is a clear sense of confidence. So it is with an eye towards risk that I share two great discussions on how interwoven the global markets are to one another.  [...]Read More >

October 18, 2013 By Steve Blumenthal For now, interest rates look to be range bound between 2.40% and 3% as illustrated on the following chart.  Which way are they headed and what should we keep our eyes on?  In today’s piece, I share some thoughts around the direction of interest rates and [...]Read More >

October 11, 2013 By Steve Blumenthal “It would be insane to default, but it’s no longer a zero-percent probability,” said Simon Johnson, a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund who teaches economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is a columnist for Bloomberg [...]Read More >

September 20, 2013 By Steve Blumenthal If you asked me five years ago if the largest investment manager on the planet, BlackRock, would suggest to a room of professionals to “allocate to flexible core bond alternatives, find unconstrained managers and implement long/short strategies”, I would [...]Read More >

September 20, 2013 By Steve Blumenthal   I have had the same hair stylist for 15 years.  Fancy word, “stylist”.  I’d say barber but he would definitely take offense, so stylist it is.  Don’t tell him but I think stylist means $45 and barber means $15.  Anyway, I’m totally loyal, I trust [...]Read More >

September 13, 2013 By Steve Blumenthal Looking for a feel-good financial read this weekend?  I highly recommend Gary Shilling’s Advantage America that John Mauldin highlighted in his most recent Outside the Box. Speaking of Mauldin, he and I spoke in Chicago at the Trinity Financial Investor [...]Read More >