Blog Posts

How much of your portfolio should be in cryptocurrency? In previous articles, we discussed cryptocurrency as an alternative to stocks and gold. To some extent, it could be. The main issue with cryptocurrencies right now is their speculative nature. It means there’s a lot of volatility, often some 10x the level of stocks, depending on […]

Increasingly, decision-making in the markets is done through artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and algorithmic decision-making.  Back in the 1990s and even into the 2000s and today, much analysis on financial markets and securities was done on spreadsheet programs like Microsoft Excel. That’s now changing to more complex ways of analyzing the world. The human […]

Lumber and other wood products went up massively in the early 2020s for various reasons. Many were related to the unique supply and demand parts of the market. Others were related to the monetary environment. We’ll put together the factors driving its movement, and also look at how this can impact other commodity markets that […]

An ESG ETF is designed to focus on the environmental, social, and governance factors of each company in the fund. According to Morningstar data, funds that seek to incorporate information on an investment’s sustainability and overall societal impacts – and select from those that meet specific criteria – have largely outperformed their traditional counterparts over […]

The digital yuan is China’s latest development in establishing itself as a global power economically.  In the mid-1980s, about 90 percent of China’s population lived in poverty. A generation later they’re challenging the United States and the West for superiority in a variety of different ways: Trade (already the largest) Economy and capital (second-largest economy […]

The price of a financial asset is money and credit divided by the quantity. So, understanding the two and the difference between money and credit is important to get at why financial assets are doing what they’re doing and help anticipate risk/reward in a market.   What is money? What is credit? Money is what […]

The rise behind high-flying assets like SPACs (blank check companies), cryptocurrencies, and NFTs is related to the environment we’re in and the large-scale liquidity that has caused a rise in all asset classes.  Interest rates in an economy are a function of nominal growth rates.  In Western economies (the United States, developed Europe, and Japan), […]

Over the years we’ve seen exceptionally volatile markets during certain periods. 1929 and 2008 were fundamentally brought on by debt crises. Discerning sophisticated investors could have done the calculations to understand that there was a lot of debt coming due that would not be paid back. They could have adjusted their positions accordingly to benefit […]

Eventual stagflation could be a risk for the economy and markets and one that’s currently vastly under-discounted. We’re in a situation where the central bank has pushed a lot of liquidity into the markets and brought up the financial economy (i.e., prices of financial assets) while the real economy (i.e., aggregate transactions volume in goods […]

The stock market is an important part of the overall functioning of the economic system. The stock market – and capital markets more generally – affect the real economy as they provide the money and credit that the real economy uses to make goods and services. The financial economy leads the real economy. The stock […]