A number of people have forwarded this Bloomberg article – Wall Street Banks Warn Downturn Is Coming – to me over the last couple of days. That fact alone is probably a good argument to ignore it but I can’t help but read articles like this if for no other reason than to know what the crowd is thinking. The gist of the article is that a bunch of sell side analysts think we are nearing the end of the current business...
Read More »Buy Gold Urges Dalio on Linkedin – “Militaristic Leaders Playing Chicken Risks Hellacious War”
Don’t let “traditional biases” stop you from diversifying into gold – Dalio on Linkedin “Risks are now rising and do not appear appropriately priced in” warns founder of world’s largest hedge fund Geo-political risk from North Korea & “risk of hellacious war” Risk that U.S. debt ceiling not raised; technical US default Safe haven gold likely to benefit by more than dollar, treasuries Investors should allocate at...
Read More »Long-Term Real Rates of Return
More from the recent working paper by Oscar Jorda, Katharina Knoll, Dmitry Kuvshinov, Moritz Schularick, and Alan Taylor (“The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870–2015“). (Previous blog post about the return on residential real estate.) Return data for 16 advanced economies over nearly 150 years … …on the income and capital gains (and thus, total returns) from equities, residential housing, government bonds, and government bills. Real returns average 7% p.a. for equity, 8% for housing,...
Read More »Sornette’s Supercomputer Is Betting On A Market Crash
Via FinancialSense.com, One of the world's most powerful supercomputers, retrofitted for trading the stock market, appears to be betting on a crash in the months ahead. The Financial Crisis Observatory (FCO) at ETH Zurich released its latest Global Bubble Status Report on July 1st. As we discussed with FCO’s director, Didier Sornette, on our podcast in May, they use one of the world’s leading supercomputers to monitor global markets each day for two distinct bubble-like...
Read More »On the Performance of Swiss Portfolio Managers
In the NZZ, Michael Schaefer reports on a study about the performance of Swiss portfolio managers in 2016. The median portfolio returns in all investment strategies except those not investing in stocks fell short of the corresponding benchmark returns. Only a fifth of the portfolios generated returns in excess of their benchmark. These numbers do not yet account for management fees. No portfolio manager generated high returns across all strategies. But some managers consistently generate...
Read More »Here Are The Best Hedges Against A Le Pen Victory
On Friday, after it emerged that as part of Marine Le Pen’s strategic vision for France, should she win, is a return to the French franc as well as redenomination of some €1.7 billion in French (non-international law) bonds, both rating agencies and economists sounded the alarm, warning it would “amount to the largest sovereign default on record, nearly 10 times larger than the €200bn Greek debt restructuring in 2012,...
Read More »Hedge funds: risk-off mode in equities
Macroview Macro managers have reduced their equity exposure amid modest positive returns year-to-date, while long/short equity managers have been challenged by sharp market rotations. Equity risk in macro managers' portfolios is below the historical average. Many expect stock markets to trend lower – not necessarily because of a coming recession but because of peak margins and outflows from petrodollar-dependent sovereign wealth funds. The effectiveness of QE programmes is also being...
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