By: Will Martin Senior Managing Director and Investment Strategist With both stock and bond markets priced for perfection, it is time to look for asset classes that can provide true diversification to lower risk and increase returns. Introduction Apple, Inc. taught us the power and promise available through embracing change, if we only learn to […]
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By: Will Martin Senior Managing Director And Investment Strategist Active investing is under siege by a proliferation of passive investments. Must there be only one winner in this fight? In last month’s edition of Cutting Through the Noise, we took a good look under the hood of passive investment vehicles, and concluded that, while they […]
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Learn About Active vs. Passive Investment Vehicles Here. By: Will Martin, CFA Senior Managing Director & Investment Strategist at Three Bell Capital Although index and exchange-traded funds (“ETF’s”) have been around for 25+ years, money has absolutely poured into these investment vehicles (and conversely out of actively-managed funds) in the nine years following the 2008 […]
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By: Will Martin, CFA Senior Managing Director & Investment Strategist at Three Bell Capital Just as Bob Dylan grappled with life’s great questions in his 1963 hit “Blowin’ in the Wind”, we at Three Bell are asking ourselves some of the market’s big questions. For example, how many times can the prevailing winds shift before […]
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Its Kryptonite is Acrophobia… PART 3 of 3 – Current Market Valuation By: Will Martin, CFA Senior Managing Director & Investment Strategist at Three Bell Capital Hand me my CAPE, Lois…it is time to help serious investors build reliable expectations! In Part 1, we learned why the CAPE (Cyclically Adjusted Price – Earnings) model is […]
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Valuation: Weighing Market Expectations – The Second in a Three-Part Series Last month we showed that stock market valuations are currently stretched, demonstrated with the Shiller-CAPE model based on a historical perspective. Stocks now appear the most expensive in history when we adjust market valuations for economic growth and earnings potential. The single, largest offsetting […]
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Valuation: The First in a Three-Part Series “Price is what you pay and value is what you get.” ~ Warren Buffet “Intelligent investing is value investing – acquiring more than you are paying for.” ~ Charlie Munger (Warren Buffet’s long-time partner at Berkshire Hathaway). Let’s talk prices. To do so, we don’t need Bob Barker, […]
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A View Into The Fed’s Inner-Sanctum I recently had the pleasure of sitting in on a discussion with former Federal Reserve Bank President from Philadelphia, Charles Plosser. Charles spent 10 years at the Fed, before terming off in 2016. We were hosted at a lovely home on University Avenue in Palo Alto. Charles’s visit was […]
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I was all set to write about the headwinds and tailwinds impacting the markets going forward, when up popped an economic number that made me double take. I typically create a mosaic of economic indicators for a sense of the economy’s future direction, but sometimes a particular number moves so much that requires focused thought […]
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Top 10 Surprises in 2017 This year, I will follow the format of one of my favorite year-end forecasts—Byron Wien’s annual Top Ten Surprises list. For more than 30 years, legendary investment strategist Byron Wien has rolled out his annual list of predictions, starting while he was at Morgan Stanley. Though he often hedges his […]
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Public Versus Private Matters | A Conversation with Jason Portnoy This year we have seen the impact of the unstoppable force, named global systems (global trade, central bank policies, currency management, ect.) run smack into the immovable object, named local politics….both here in the US and abroad. The results have been a pendulum swing back […]
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The yield on the 10-year Treasury is the economy’s thermometer. The economy’s current growth rate, growth and inflation expectations, and the cost of debt financing are embedded in one number—the rate our government borrows money at for ten years. Our thermometer registered a feverish reading in the hyperinflation of the 1970s, and steadily fell for […]
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…THE INCREDIBLE LEVITATING MARKET This month we investigate the forces that drive the stock market higher in spite of weaker corporate earnings: Lower interest rates help discount a company’s future earnings to look more attractive than the rates investors can get on their cash and bond holdings. Thus, lower rates encourage investors to pay higher […]
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Corporate earnings estimates have been lowered for 13 straight quarters Corporate profits using GAAP are now only back to the level of earnings prior to the 2008 financial crisis Earnings “massages” are back in vogue, gimmicky accounting tactics not seen since the Great Recession. Stock prices have recently been driven by corporate actions and low […]
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“Greed is good.” —Gordon Gecko, the infamous mogul from the iconic 1987 film Wall Street “Growth is good.” —Nearly every Central Banker on the planet Stories of unbridled greed rarely end well. During the rampant real-estate speculation that led to the financial crisis, Mr. Gecko’s audacious theory was tested yet again in financial markets. The […]
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Opportunities in a slow growth/high volatility investment world… We all know the proverb about the three blind men and an elephant, in which the blind men come to completely different conclusions about the elephant’s characteristics because of their limited perspectives. So what happens when the three blind men perfectly describe the entire elephant? Call me […]
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The mutual fund industry has offered investors many benefits over the years: professional management, diversification, and market access. However, these benefits have come at a price of relatively steep fees and middling results. Unfortunately, a strong case can be made that some of the benefits of professional management have slowly eroded as mutual fund management […]
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Financial news is so ubiquitous that it has become financial noise. I will not add to that sound chamber. Instead, this blog commits to cutting through the cluttered jabber, and promises to never simply summarize the summaries. The opinions within pull from analysis of respected research, delivering insights and perspectives that inform investment decisions. Significant […]
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