Blog Posts

Consumer staples are among the most stable types of stocks that return fairly consistently. The volatility of stocks is one of the main reasons why many traders and investors are hesitant to commit to them. What are consumer staples and what makes them attractive? Certain businesses involve selling products people need to physically live. This […]

The geopolitical war occurring between the US and China is one of the many conflicts occurring between the two countries, including: i) trade and economic ii) capital (currency, debt, capital markets) iii) technology iv) geopolitical v) military As we’ve mentioned in other articles, understanding these various conflicts are important for traders and investors to understand. They involve the two largest […]

The technology war is a particularly serious conflict within the scope of US-China relations. Both countries know that whoever is superior technologically will also be superior in most other ways. Whoever wins the technology war is also very likely to win the economic and military wars as well. For this reason, the technology war is […]

US-China relations, and the capital war conflict within it, is and will be a big driver of markets going forward and is important to understand even for those with shorter-term trading orientations. The same things tend to happen over and over again for the same reasons historically. By studying what happened in other societies and […]

Market participants are always looking to maximize their reward relative to their risk. One of the best ways to have the big upside without having the unacceptable downside is through the efficient use of options and derivatives. In this article, we’ll go through building a balanced portfolio with options. Options can provide leveraged returns with […]

Portfolio construction and the concept of building a better portfolio beyond the way assets come pre-packaged to you is one of the most under-talked about areas in finance. As we write this to close out 2020, stock market indices in the US and many throughout the world are hitting new all-time highs. Traders are keen […]

Business cycle analysis often involves an aggregation of past experiences and then tying together the cause-effect relationships that drove those cycles. Traders are especially interested in business cycle analysis given how it drives trends in asset classes, sectors, and investment outcomes. For example, early-cycle tends to be favorable to cyclical stocks while late-cycle favors being […]

When we talk about the question of are stocks overvalued, we need to frame the idea in terms of multiples of a metric that underlies their values. The value of a business is fundamentally the amount of cash that you can earn from it discounted back to the present. Earnings is revenue minus expenses. Free […]

With short-term and long-term interest rates at zero in all of the main reserve currencies (USD, EUR, JPY), market participants will have to increasingly look for alternatives to bonds and cash. Cash and bonds are two of the main three asset classes in addition to stocks. But all developed economies are suffering from high debt […]

In previous articles, we’ve covered the concepts of balanced beta and how to build a balanced portfolio in more depth. We’ve also covered the concept of the volatility risk premium, commonly abbreviated VRP. In this article, we’re going to combine the two concepts, building a balanced portfolio with what we call VRP overlay. A balanced […]