How a Retail Investor Army Went to Battle With a $12.5 Billion Hedge Fund — and Won
Jan 26, 2021 | Investing Strategies
Ten or 20 years ago, the small retail investor was supposed to be afraid of hedge funds. To put it another way: In the old market ecosystem, hedge funds were the predators and retail investors were the prey. And the bigger the hedge fund — as measured by billions of dollars in assets under management — the more of a…
Implications of the Super-K Recovery
Jan 21, 2021 | Investing Strategies
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” You might remember that line from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. We reference it now, in 2021, because never before has the line been more true. As the pandemic raged last spring, a debate raged alongside as to what kind of economic recovery the United…
The Fading Fate of the U.S. Dollar is Long-Run Bullish for All Kinds of Assets
Jan 07, 2021 | Investing Strategies
The U.S. dollar could start to lose its world reserve currency status in the 2020s. Not all at once, and not overnight, but steadily over a period of years. In fact, the process may have already begun, which would partly explain the dollar’s powerful downtrend from March 2020 onward. At the moment, the dollar is still a world reserve currency…
Terms You Should Know: Financial Repression and Fiscal Dominance
Dec 30, 2020 | Investing Strategies
Editor’s Note: When a mountain of debt builds up over the course of many decades — as we have seen over the past 40 years or so — you wind up with huge amounts of government spending to keep economies going, even as central banks conspire to inflate the debt away. In today’s “best of” series, we cover two must-know terms…
In Both Investing and Poker, sometimes a Weak Hand Beats a Strong One
Dec 25, 2020 | Investing Strategies
Editor’s Note: For Christmas day, a Christmas riddle: When does a weak hand beat a strong one? In today’s “best of” lookback, we compare investing to high stakes poker — two activities with a great deal of overlap — and explain why it is often the surrounding situation that matters most, with the shape of events sometimes making the weaker…
A ‘Rogue Wave’ of Vaccine-Related Optimism Up-Ends Prior Winners and Creates New Ones
Nov 11, 2020 | Investing Strategies
When Pfizer, in conjunction with BioNTech, announced more than 90% effective vaccine results on Nov. 9, the entire investing world got reordered. Suddenly, there was a wholly different reconfiguration of what the world could look like in a years’ time. It doesn’t happen often, but the market does this every once in a while. An unanticipated event, or an unexpected…
A Surprising Reason (Among Others) Why Bitcoin is Outperforming Gold
Oct 30, 2020 | Investing Strategies
If you own gold, you are likely satisfied with the yellow metal’s annual performance thus far. As of Oct. 29, the gold price was up more than 25% year-to-date, as determined by Comex gold futures. GLD, the popular gold ETF, was up a tad less at just under 23%. Bitcoin, however, has blown past gold like it was standing still….
Restaurant Industry Trends are a Microcosm of Accelerated Creative Destruction
Oct 15, 2020 | Investing Strategies
In a book written in 1942 titled Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, the Austrian-born economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the term “creative destruction” and called it “the essential fact about capitalism.” Creative destruction “revolutionizes the economic structure from within,” Schumpeter wrote, “incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.” The creative destruction process is all too often painful. Entire industries…
Financial Conditions are Tight, and Markets Are Vulnerable
Sep 30, 2020 | Investing Strategies
Financial conditions are tighter right now than they’ve been in years. That might sound surprising. After all, the Federal Reserve, and the U.S. government, have taken unprecedented measures in 2020. The Federal Reserve has expanded its balance sheet by trillions, made a promise to support the corporate bond market, and said interest rates will stay near zero until 2023. The…
Why Corporate Treasury Departments Will Come to Embrace Bitcoin
Sep 29, 2020 | Investing Strategies
MicroStrategy, a Nasdaq-listed company with a roughly $1.5 billion market cap, is the first publicly traded entity to embrace Bitcoin as a corporate treasury asset. But it won’t be the last. As of Sept. 15, 2020, MicroStrategy (MSTR) revealed it had purchased 38,250 Bitcoins at an aggregate price of $425 million, including fees and expenses. MicroStrategy had originally purchased $250…
