Blog Posts

Traders who use a dividend capture strategy usually trade in and out of a stock to obtain the stock’s dividend without having to hold it long-term. Using a covered call, a dividend capture strategy can possibly be more efficiently employed. At the least, it offers a unique method by which dividend capture can be used […]

To start, this is not an article on this year’s annual outlook. We have a piece on intermediate-term financial asset performance (out 5-10 years) and others about navigating the upcoming decades, broken up into a Part I and Part II. Every decade tends to have a different flavor to it in terms of what asset […]

Trading and investing in the 2020s will require a different kind of template than the one that worked in the 2010s. The set of conditions and forces that drove strong double-digit equity returns during the 2010s (at least in the US and developed markets) are no longer in place. In other articles, we’ve covered the […]

This article will look at estimates of what kind of financial returns can be expected out over the next 5 to 10 years. This will take into account the main asset classes – stocks (developed market, emerging), government bonds (developed market), credit, and alternative risk premia (private equity and real estate). We will also look […]

Traders rarely talk about diversification. Part of it is normal in the sense that some specialize in a particular asset class and are prone to the whims of whatever behavior that asset class exhibits and how they’re positioned within it. But for the most part, traders have a natural behavioral bias to favor whatever assets […]

The covered call – sometimes called a “buy-write” – is a common trading strategy used among all types of market participants, from day traders to institutions that often hold securities for years. A trader executes a covered call by taking a long position in a security and short-selling a call option on the underlying security […]

Traditionally, toward the end of bull markets, assets of the worst quality tend to take off. We’re also seeing this type of froth in certain pockets of the market. For example, Tesla, despite its poor balance sheet, difficulty in selling cars profitably, and its status as a car company (a capital-intensive, thin margin industry) has […]

People flock to the financial markets with the intention of making money and securing themselves financially. This article provides an illustrative example of how to make $100,000 per year from the markets. For most, this amount is enough to support a quality lifestyle. At the least, it’s a nice side income stream that alone would […]

Inter-commodity spreads (commonly known as ICS), represent the spreads between different futures contracts. Certain brokerages (e.g., Interactive Brokers) and futures exchanges (e.g., CME Group) allow you to trade them directly. The purpose of inter-commodity spreads (ICS) Many traders employ spread, or relative value, strategies. Broadly speaking, this means selling an expensive asset and buying an […]

The IIF recently published that the global debt stock has reached $255.3 trillion at the end of 2019. This also doesn’t take into account non-debt liabilities like pensions and healthcare (which, when capitalized, are many times larger), and are debt-like in nature because they represent future IOUs. Namely, retirees expect that they will receive retirement […]