Weekly Commentary

I just spent a week largely disconnected from markets. I spent time with clients and business owners hearing about their concerns and growth challenges. It was refreshing. It is an exercise I try to repeat periodically, not just for the mental reset from the markets, but for the perspective it forces upon me. When I […]

The headline last week was difficult to miss. SpaceX completed one of the largest IPOs in market history, and Elon Musk’s net worth surged toward levels once thought impossible. The result was a new publicly traded company valued at $2.1 trillion and the world’s first trillionaire. No one in the modern era has owned more […]

What can history teach us about obvious opportunities? On Friday, the markets sold off after a stronger-than-expected employment report pushed interest rates higher. At least that’s what the headlines read. But I have another theory. This week, investors may be preparing for the largest IPO in history. At roughly $75 billion of expected proceeds and […]

Two investors tell us almost everything we need to know about bubbles. The first was one of the smartest people who ever lived: Isaac Newton. In 1720, he got caught up in the South Sea Bubble. He reportedly made money early, sold, watched others keep getting richer, and then bought back in near the top. […]

There’s an old investing lesson that says consumers vote twice: first with surveys, then with their wallets. Usually, those two things eventually line up, but right now they couldn’t be further apart. Consumer sentiment has collapsed to levels normally associated with recessions, financial crises, or major unemployment shocks. The latest University of Michigan survey is […]

A few days ago, I was standing in line at a convenience store somewhere in rural Oregon. The guy in front of me bought gas, a sports drink, beef jerky, and a can of ZYNs. The cashier read him the total and he paused for a second, looked down, and quietly put the beef jerky […]

Economic expansions are strange because investors expect them to feel obvious while they’re happening, and they usually feel fragile. There are always reasons to be cautious. Oil prices, interest rates, and political headlines create uncertainty. Economists debate recession probabilities on television as if downturns arrive on scheduled calendars. Yet underneath all that noise, the actual […]

For most of this cycle, the U.S. economy has been carried by the consumer. People complained about inflation, worried about rates, grumbled about the price of groceries, and then kept spending anyway. That is the odd resilience of the last few years. The consumer does not feel great, but the register keeps ringing. Now the […]

There is a strange split in the economy right now. Consumers say they feel terrible as sentiment is scraping along near historic lows. If you just looked at survey data, you would assume the economy was already rolling over and the stock market should be struggling. But that is not what is happening. People may […]

Last week, I wrote (Can Fear Fuel The Next Rally?) that the tone of the news had become so negative that it was beginning to create the conditions for a rally, rather than setting up another leg down. That is often how markets work. They bottom or rebound not when the headlines improve—although they sometimes […]