This weekend, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway holds its annual meeting where investors flock to Omaha Nebraska to listen to the valuable insights offered by Buffett and his partner Charlie Munger.  It’s a great time to reflect on why these investors have been so successful and how it can be applied to our own investments.  Today,...Read More

Investors and market participants often get told that the way to get rich is buying quality companies or properties.  Firstly, it is important to define quality.  For many, quality is conflated with credit risk.  For example, U.S. government debt is often seen as having the least chance of a default than any other bonds, mostly...Read More

The last two weeks have been about as volatile and fear-driven as we’ve seen since March 2020.  While these crises always seem existential at the time, the reality is that we get these periods of high stress just about every year, and the reasons are always different.  Just last year, the Russian/Ukraine war and rampant...Read More

Markets continue to exhibit higher volatility due to economic data that indicates that higher for longer Federal Reserve interest rate policies are more likely.  At TTCM, we view predicting macroeconomic data as being a rather pyrrhic enterprise, as success rates for even supposed experts, are far less than 50%.  By focusing on individual securities and...Read More

In early 2023, we have seen a bit of a return of the speculative euphoria that was so pervasive in 2020 and 2021, which has driven up asset prices once again.  Market participants are more optimistic about things based on the belief that inflationary pressures are headed far lower, which should result in the end...Read More

  “You don’t find out who is swimming naked until the tide comes out.” Warren Buffett   Financial markets over the short-term are akin to middle school popularity contests.  The euphoria or pessimism of the day generally reflects recent price performance.  Because there is 24/7 coverage, media pundits feel like they have to give reasons...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

2022 is shaping up to be quite the crazy year.  While this horrible war in Ukraine dominates media headlines, I can’t help but feeling like inflation might be the dominant theme of the next decade.  Using “government” numbers, inflation is running at about 7.9%.  Shelter is the single biggest component of CPI at 33% of...Read More

Well that was one heck of a week.  While I certainly was not smart enough to predict the results of the election, it has had a profound impact on my expectations for us as investors.  For the last 7 years, I’ve been one of the most vocal advocates of financial stocks that I am aware...Read More

July 29th, the Federal Reserve announced the results of the CCAR process including the requested capital return actions for the big banks. Unsurprisingly to those that have been reading this newsletter, the results were very good and we have seen an influx of dramatic dividend increases and stock buybacks. Below I’ll outline a few of...Read More