Photo Credit: John.U || Look at all those eggs in one basket! The owner *is* watching it carefully, right? Jason Zweig recent wrote an article on owning stock in the company that you work for. Then today in his WSJ newsletter he asked the following question: What’s the most concentrated investment position you’ve ever had? (In other words, what single investment made up the greatest proportion of your portfolio?) Did it work out well or poorly? What did you learn from it? I have one article to answer both questions called Life with Wife. It’s a cute article which runs through two times in my life where I had an overly concentrated investment position. The first one was regarding The St. Paul … [Read More...]

Photo Credit: mark m || Every now and then, a change in tactics is justified In 1994, there did come a limit where valuations of long debt undershot and started to come back. After more thought, the short-term yield effect of convexity hedging probably peaks out around 2.5-3.0% on 30-year mortgages. Unless the Fed becomes an aggressive seller of the their long bonds, and now-long MBS, I don’t see long rates going past their recent highs. As such, I am likely to begin buying a little bit of long Treasuries as a hedge against market weakness induced by the likely Fed overshoot. Recently the short-term correlation between stocks and 30-year Treasuries has seemed to go back to stocks down, bonds up, and vice-versa. … [Read More...]

Photo Credits: Jen and www.david baxendale.com with help from pinetools || The casino is exciting. The scale is honest and unrelenting. I want to give an update to one of the major concepts of Ben Graham, in order to make it fit the modern era better. Ben Graham said: “In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.”https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/831517-in-the-short-run-the-market-is-a-voting-machine quoted from The Intelligent Investor So let me modify it: In the short run, the market is a casino, but in the long run, it is a scale. Is this an improvement? Probably not, but speculation has become so rampant that … [Read More...]

Image Credit: Aleph Blog with help from FRED || Look at the mortgage rates fly! Okay, you might or might not remember the last piece. But since that time, 30-year mortgage rates have risen more than 1%. Is the Fed dawdling? Maybe, but the greater threat is that they become too aggressive, and blow up the financial economy, leading us into another decade-long bout of financial repression. As it stands right now, mortgage rates are in a self-reinforcing rising cycle, and it will not end until the Fed raises the Fed funds rate until it inverts the Treasury yield curve. But if I were on the FOMC, I would ignore inflation and the labor markets, and I would watch the financial economy to avoid blowing … [Read More...]