One of the hardest aspects of investing is dealing with the psychological challenges financial markets present.  Mr. Market’s extreme pessimism or optimism can be contagious at exactly the wrong time, leading to big losses and permanent losses of capital, which are precisely what we are most focused on avoiding.  The current market is being dominated...Read More

Value After Hours S04 E27: Small Value is Quality, Energy in Food, Financials and the Consumer  Read More

When you are in the midst of a bear market, all the news is bad.  You are usually either in or about to be in a recession. Analysts that kept telling you to buy stocks at 50% higher prices, now tell you to sell the same stocks despite them being dramatically cheaper.  Economic data gets...Read More

  Today’s CPI inflation data came in hot at 8.3%, down slightly from the previous report, but higher than expectations. Inflation is rampant in all the key areas that impact our daily lives such as food, energy, shelter and transportation.  The sting of higher prices and the disruption emerging from the Chinese lockdowns has the...Read More

On Wednesday the Federal Reserve raised interest rates by 50 bps, or 1/2%.  Initially the market reacted favorably to this with a strong rally on Wednesday, only to be reversed with the biggest down day since 2020 on Thursday.  Tech/glamour stocks have simply been getting obliterated.  Tesla dropped 8.3% on the day, while Amazon dropped...Read More

What a terrible month for the equity markets.  As I write this, the Nasdaq looks set to close down 12.% for April, which is its worst monthly performance since October of 2008, which was when we were seeing some of the worst developments of the Financial Crisis.  The index is now down more than 23%...Read More

Today the Case/Shiller housing price data came out and it showed prices up nearly 20% YoY. Brent crude oil touched $80 per barrel and is on course for its best month since February. Treasury yields have risen quite dramatically over the last week, with the 10-year now above 1.5%, the highest since June.  Natural gas...Read More

Rob Arnott of Research Affiliates is one of the best investment strategists around. He wrote a fantastic article on the opportunity in value investing, so instead of going on about it, I’m just going to let you read it to get a good grasp of the opportunity in front of us.  Here was one quote...Read More

    The image above shows the S&P Growth/Value ratio. As you can see, this ratio has hit a new marginal high, to an all-time record.  This means that the valuation spread between growth and value has never been more extreme.  Interestingly, we saw a similar pattern occur in 2000, right before the Nasdaq began...Read More

Today the August jobs report came out and was quite disappointing.  The U.S. only added 235,000 jobs, which was well short of expectations that were for over 700,000 new jobs.  Fears regarding the Delta variant likely had a role in this big miss.  Many businesses I’ve talked to have expressed immense frustration about a lack...Read More