March 2016

The Fool’s Gold

“Patterns are the fool’s gold of financial markets” Benoit Mandelbrot In 1976, a group of economists discovered that stocks tended to do well in January, small cap stocks in particular. Small cap stocks returned 26% in January of 1975 and an 18% in January of 1976, enough to get anybody’s attention.  This came to be…

Are We Due For A Recession?

That depends on what you mean by “due.” Are we due in the sense that it has been a while since the last recession? Sure. Since 1926, recessions have happened on average every 59 months. We’re currently 80 months removed from the last recession. Are we due in the sense that stocks have gone too…

Admissions of Uncertainty

“It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously”- Daniel Kahneman Apple is the biggest and one of the most carefully watched stocks in the world. It’s 50-day average volume is 49,069,563 shares, or roughly $4.8 billion a day. The buyer and the seller of every one of those shares believes they are receiving a…

Teddy Roosevelt Versus Jay Gould

I want to share an amazing piece of history that I found in the New York Times archive from 1882. It pertains to Teddy Roosevelt, who in addition to being the youngest President of the United States, was also the youngest New York assemblyman. In one of Roosevelt’s first acts as an assemblyman, he would…

A View From The Bottom

We’ve seen some explosive moves since the S&P 500 bottomed on January 20th. 241 S&P 500 stocks are up double digits, 29 stocks are up more than 20%, and 8 stocks are up more than 50%. Below is a further dissection of recent S&P 500 performance from the bottom. Here are the returns of the…

Calling It Versus Nailing It, Redux

The only thing gold miners and biotech stocks have in common is their extreme performance over the past few years. While miners lost 76% of their value between 2011 and 2015, biotechs gained 241%. Below you’ll see the 31-week rate of change of gold miners versus biotechs, which has spent most of the last few…

Good Luck, Bad Luck

“There’s a quick and easy way to test whether an activity involves skill; ask whether you can lose on purpose. In games of skill, it’s clear that you can lose intentionally but when playing roulette or the lottery you can’t lose on purpose.” – Michael Mauboussin I don’t believe that stock picking is entirely a…

Risk On

Well that was a fun day. Let’s get right into some of the data. 100% of large cap financials were positive, which has now happened twice over the last six days. XLF is up 11.6% from the lows made on February 11th. The transports, which were a major laggard all of 2015, are up 17.3%…

Misconduct

A new paper was recently published titled The Market for Financial Adviser Misconduct by Mark Egan, Gregor Matvos, and Amit Seru.  It takes a deep dive into financial adviser shenanigans and quantifies everything from repeat offenders, to misconduct across firms, to the consequences of misconduct. This is a must read for anybody in the industry. Below…