June 16, 2017 By Steve Blumenthal “Make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the other is gold.” – Author Unknown The words above were etched on a wooden plaque that hung in my family’s kitchen.  Mom was sending us a message and she’d point us to those words anytime we were quick to [...]Read More >

June 9, 2017 By Steve Blumenthal “Your job as investors is to feel sick to your stomach. Do not invest when you are excited and everything is great… go shopping when things go on sale.” “We will have a recession sometime within the next 12 months.  It is not going to be different this time.” – [...]Read More >

June 2, 2017 By Steve Blumenthal “The initial conditions or the starting point conditions, mean to me that a small degree of monetary restraint has a very quick and strong impact on economic activity.”  - Lacy H. Hunt, Ph.D., Hoisington Investment Management 2017 Strategic Investment [...]Read More >

May 26, 2017 By Steve Blumenthal "If you make an investment and feel good about it, you'll lose money. If you make an investment and you don’t feel good about it, you’ll make money. Go shopping when things are on sale." –  Mark Yusko, Morgan Creek Capital Management 2017 Strategic Investment [...]Read More >

May 19, 2017 By Steve Blumenthal “Over the long term, what raises living standards is productivity—the amount that is produced per person—which increases from coming up with new ideas and implementing ways of producing efficiently.  Productivity evolves slowly, so it doesn’t drive big economic [...]Read More >

May 12, 2017 By Steve Blumenthal “In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.” – Benjamin Graham When Ronald Reagan entered office in 1981, forward return expectations were a high 18.91% (see chart below: green line, left-hand side).  Equally [...]Read More >

May 5, 2017 By Steve Blumenthal “Bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism and die on euphoria.” – Sir John Templeton I presented at a recent advisor conference alongside a famous economist.  He told a story about an investment manager who told him, “You know… [...]Read More >

April 28, 2017 By Steve Blumenthal “The hardest part in trying to limit losses is not necessarily timing the market, but imparting the wisdom of limiting losses upon your clients. To limit drawdowns advisors and their clients cannot fully embrace raging bull markets that are excessively [...]Read More >

April 21, 2017 By Steve Blumenthal “The biggest mistake investors make is to believe that what happened in the recent past is likely to persist. They assume that something that was a good investment in the recent past is still a good investment. Typically, high past returns simply imply that an [...]Read More >

April 14, 2017 By Steve Blumenthal “…the Fed has typically tightened too much and/or for too long. From this long history, a well-established pattern is identifiable. The economic growth rate along with inflation receded. A financial crisis was more likely than not.” – Van R. Hoisington and [...]Read More >

April 7, 2017 By Steve Blumenthal “To refer to a personal taste of mine, I’m going to buy hamburgers the rest of my life. When hamburgers go down in price, we sing the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ in the Buffett household. When hamburgers go up in price, we weep. For most people, it’s the same with [...]Read More >

March 31, 2017 By Steve Blumenthal I’m going to try to tie two related themes together today.  The first, and I have to admit I was surprised when I saw the research, is the incredible shrinking universe of stocks.  Think corporate share buybacks, mergers and acquisitions and fewer companies [...]Read More >

March 24, 2017 By Steve Blumenthal “First, if the bubble were to collapse on its own, would the effect on the economy be exceedingly large? Second, is it unlikely that the Fed could mitigate the consequences? Third, is monetary policy the best tool to use to deflate a house-price bubble? My [...]Read More >

March 17, 2017 By Steve Blumenthal “Time is like a river that will take you forward into encounters with reality that will require you to make decisions. You can’t stop the movement down this river, and you can’t avoid the encounters. You can only approach these encounters in the best way [...]Read More >

March 10, 2017 By Steve Blumenthal “There have been 13 Fed rate hike cycles in the post-WWII era and 10 landed the economy in recession. Soft landings are rare and when they have occurred, they have come in the third year of the expansion, not the eighth.” - David Rosenberg, Gluskin Sheff + [...]Read More >