Investing for long-term returns while managing risk.
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The current level of stock market valuations remains – easily – the most speculative extreme in U.S. financial history, beyond both the 1929 and 2000 extremes. Our baseline estimate is that the S&P 500 has a material risk of losing something on the order of 75% over the completion of this cycle. Still, we can use historically-informed valuation measures and risk estimates without making our…
The essential feature of a useful alternative asset isn’t that it’s unusual or exotic, but that its returns aren’t tightly linked to the risks that already dominate the portfolio. The value of an alternative asset comes from the way it interacts with the other assets in the portfolio. The lower the correlation, particularly if the asset tends to hold value or advance when the rest of the portfolio…
What to do? Does one capitulate and chase the bubble at the highest valuations in history? Does one wring their hands at the prospect of a bubble that might only go higher and higher forever without end? My hope is that this month’s comment will offer both perspective and confidence that it is not necessary to chase current extremes, nor to be anxious even about the possibility of steeper ones.…
The growing reliance on ever-higher profit margin assumptions is having an increasing influence on expected earnings - and therefore on price-to-forward-earnings multiples. Based on earnings through the end of 2025, operating margins are just under 16%. They are projected to rise to nearly 19.5% in 2026 and to almost 21% by 2027. Market risk that was previously visible as a steep…
The defining feature of a Ponzi scheme is that it persuades investors to pay for future cash flows that, at least in part, don’t actually exist, while creating the impression that those cash flows imply an attractive return on the price investors pay. If we look carefully at the record valuation extremes in the equity market, and the wildly elevated profit margins that investors appear to view as…
The word 'equilibrium' is an invitation to recognize that nothing exists by itself, alone. Subject and object are two sides of the same coin – their interaction is a single phenomenon. That perspective can offer a great deal of insight about economics, financial markets, speculative bubbles, passive investing, and nearly everything in existence.
To love a bubble but hate a crash is to misunderstand the market. A bubble is a crash on its way to becoming. A crash is a bull market on its way to becoming. All we can do is to accept, and as difficult as it may be – embrace – whatever form we have in the present moment, so we can do our best with each of them. We don’t need the bubble to be eliminated. We don’t need to grind our teeth until the…
Current record-high stock market valuations rest partly on the assumption that inflation volatility and recession risk will remain low. Historically, periods of stable inflation and infrequent recessions have supported elevated valuations, while rising inflation uncertainty and repeated downturns have led to meaningful valuation compression.
The defining feature of every bubble is the same: a growing inconsistency between the long-term returns that investors expect in their heads - based on extrapolation of the past, and the long-term returns that properly relate prices to likely future cash flows - based on valuations. Every bubble smuggles the same tragic past into the same tragic future by packaging it with new wrinkles that…
With the federal government open after its longest shutdown on record, we will soon get a clear indication of how payrolls fared in September and October. The most recent data, through August, already showed a marked slowdown in job growth, and much of the alternative data released during the shutdown suggests that this weakness has likely continued. There are already a handful of labor market…
