Tag Archives: Alhambra Portfolios

Fear tends to manifest itself much more quickly than greed, so volatile markets tend to be on the downside. In up markets, volatility tends to gradually decline. Philip Roth Be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others are fearful. Warren Buffett The new year hasn’t gotten off to a great start for growth stocks or any of the other speculative assets that have drawn so much attention over the last couple of years. Bitcoin is down 25% since the...

The economic news recently has been better than expected and in most cases just pretty darn good. That isn’t true on a global basis as Europe continues to experience a pretty sluggish recovery from COVID. And China is busy shooting itself in the foot as Xi pursues the re-Maoing of Chinese society, damn the economic costs. But here in the US, the rebound from the Q3 slowdown is in full bloom. Just last week we had pending home sales, ADP employment, both ISM reports,...

A couple of weeks ago the 10 year Treasury note yield rose 16 basis points in the course of 5 trading days. That move was driven by near term inflation fears as I discussed last week. Long term inflation expectations were and are well behaved. I wrote nearly 2000 words last week about that change in inflation expectations and I’m so glad you took the time to read it. And now you can forget it because over the next four days all but 2 basis points of the move in the...

Today is the 50th anniversary of the “Nixon shock”, the day President Richard Nixon closed the gold window and ended the post-WWII Bretton Woods currency agreement. That agreement, largely a product of John Maynard Keynes, pegged the dollar to gold and most other currencies to the dollar. It wasn’t a true gold standard as only other countries that were party to the agreement could demand gold in exchange for their dollars, but it was at least a standard of some...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]If you were waiting for a correction in stock prices to put some money to work, you got your chance last week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down nearly 1000 points at the low Monday and closed down 725, a loss of a little over 2%. The S&P 500 did a little better but closed down 1.5%.

Is there anyone left out there who doesn’t know the rate of economic growth is slowing? The 10 year Treasury yield has fallen 45 basis points since peaking in mid-March. 10 year TIPS yields have fallen by the same amount and now reside below -1% again. Copper prices peaked a little later (early May), fell 16% at the recent low and are still down nearly 12% from the highs. Crude oil has recently joined in, falling 7% from its recent high. Energy stocks are in a full...