Investment Management

Uneven Recovery Yesterday’s latest inflation (CPI) number continues the downward trend, which is exactly what people want to see. The unattractive part of the report was the 7.8% shelter inflation, which is a core issue. More on that below. While the S&P and the Nasdaq are recovering just fine, many asset classes are still down badly. The long-duration Treasury market…

Demographics & Literacy We’ve written recently about the importance of demographics in investing over long periods. This week I wanted to highlight the role that education plays. As a refresher, population growth is a significant tailwind for a country’s GDP growth and vice versa. The United States has an immigration advantage that other developed nations have opted not to use….

Early Days We are still in the earliest days of generative AI tools. Much of what has been released to date is a proof of concept. One neat emergent behavior of generative AI tools is that they seem to behave more like people and less like computers or calculators. Generative AI, so far, is lacking precision and accuracy, but it…

XB100 Deep Tech List – Bessemer I enjoyed reading this list of the 100 leading deep tech companies by Bessemer Venture Partners as well as the intro letter. Bessemer is also known for maintaining the Cloud 100, the leading 100 public cloud companies. While the list is probably repetitive for many, it’s useful to be aware of, for example, the…

Land Value Tax is a compelling and relatively unknown economic philosophy related to land taxation. Henry George popularized it in the late 1800s and fans of his work are known as Georgists. This week, we’ve decided to focus on this topic to spread awareness of Georgism as a plausible solution to our nation’s serious urban housing, inequality, budget and populist…

Mid-Year Winners The performance gap between the equal-weight S&P 500 and the regular-weight S&P 500 is on track for it’s largest gap since the metric started 30+ years ago. This indicates a growing split between haves and have-nots. The winners are obvious, they are the technology leaders with the largest balance sheets like NVidia, Meta, Google, Apple, and so on….

Inflation Truflation’s US inflation metrics fell to 2.98% this week. This is a decent proxy for the direction of the CPI and PCE, the official government inflation statistics used to set policy. I’ve seen a lot of complaints in the media about prices still being high. An obvious but important note is that falling inflation does not translate to falling…

Global Inflation Over the past week, the real-time US inflation tracker Truflation has dropped another .5% to 3.36%. The UK is still stuck with high inflation, with official numbers at 10.1% and the Truflation figure at 15.28% (down from 22%). The bad spots are still Argentina with an eye-watering 109% inflation rate and Turkey at 44%. The rest of the…

CPI Inflation The trend is your friend. Thankfully yesterday’s CPI came in just a bit lower than last month’s at 4.9%. From a peak of 9.1% in June ‘22, each of the last 10 reports has ticked progressively lower. The Fed’s rate hikes aim to lower inflation to 2%, which is still far away despite considerable progress. The rate hikes…