Knowledge Center

Markets are about the future, and the future is about change. Let’s see what the light of a half-century’s worth of birthday candles can shed on the past, the present and – if possible – the future.

Just how far is Detroit willing to go to support used-vehicle prices?

The honor of calling the bottom in oil we leave to others. Herewith a trio of picks which can thrive with or without a new bull market in crude.

It almost goes without saying that risk pops out of the place where you aren’t looking. What is the eastern azure hiding now?

Low volatility is self-perpetuating---until one day when it isn’t.

There's no going back to 2007, the chair might as well have announced.

It's an interest-rate-centric world, even without real interest rates.

In the absence of price discovery, "we really don't know the price of credit," says the CEO of Deutsche Bank. Suggestions, Mario Draghi?

A certain subprime-lender-cum-retailer is front and center in this exploration of the mores of late-cycle American credit. How many checks can a mother write?

Yes, we do know many other tickers besides this somewhat familiar one, though few whose share price is so evidently out of sync with the fast-breaking news.

Friday marks the eighth anniversary of the end of the Great Recession – and the start of a non-great expansion. Then, again, it's boomed in its way.

Now all that remains is the work of transitioning $150 trillion or so financial contracts.

The oracle of mean reversion, anatomist of bubbles and prophet of climate change has changed his mind. Should we change ours, too?

The whys and wherefores of radical monetary intervention as explained by a central banker to an audience consisting (evidently) of school children. Something lost in translation, we hope?

"False allegations," "misinformation" and a rocket fired by a Toronto law firm. It seems that someone spoke without permission to a certain financial analyst.

With news of another positive print in GDP growth, the long-running Australian economic expansion sets a new world record for the greatest streak of unchecked prosperity in modern times. How a lucky country shackled itself to an unlucky one.

In the past three months, foreign central banks have resumed their purchase of Treasurys. Another impediment to a higher Fed funds rate and a steeper Treasury yield curve.

What are the chances of Warren Buffett being wrong?

Proverbial--like "Bank of United States" or "Hindenburg"--will become the name of a certain encumbered Far Eastern property developer.

President Trump's "double whammy."

A shipwreck ought to be valued like a shipwreck.

How to square a strong jobs market and improving credit scores with a rise in bad debt?

A report from J Capital Research...

Bitcoin is on fire, other digital currencies are likewise making new highs and ICOs--initial coin offerings--are supplanting, in some small degree, the dearth of equity IPOs. Still, the question lingers: What's the wampum good for?

Shrinkage is the corporate theme. In store count, share count and revenue count, less is the new more. In the absence of growth, apply more debt.

There are innumerable books on how to manage your money. Here might be the best book on how to mismanage it.

In China, too, April is the cruelest month.

Take every known principle of long-term investment success, negate those precepts and multiply the negative times leverage. Welcome to the world of the ultra-funds.

A land of opportunity--for value investors, that is--loses its allure.

A short survey of the world's listed central banks. How many can you name?

As the economist famously said, stability breeds instability. Today's peace and quiet is inducing a kind of mass unconscious time migration back to 1987. We write to expose the newer strategies that mimic the portfolio insurance of yesteryear.

A massively oversubscribed, covenant-spare, yield-sparse, single-B-rated eurobond deal raises the question: Are you pleased with yourself now, Mario Draghi?

The price revolution rages in the office and on the factory floor as well as in the home. Competition hots up, profit margins flatten while Mr. Market---Mr. Market, are you paying attention?

Serenity in the weather eerily mirrors serenity in the VIX. Your invitation to lever up in certain insurance-related securities? Beware of the man who insists, "Yes!"

There's one bank, at least, that can make money just by printing the stuff.

In trying to perfect the driverless car, Silicon Valley has invented an exciting new children’s game: “Throw the ball and watch the car stop.” No easy workaround for the problem of “deferential paralysis.” Hey, Uber: You’ll be paying the drivers for years to come.

America’s largest bank needs a copy editor.

Once upon a time, investors used machines. Nowadays, machines use investors. Herewith a speculation on the consequences of auto-investing, along with a revisit to a known Grant’s pick-not-to-click.

Again, how many rate rises are on tap this year?

Framed by a presidential musing, some deep out-of-the-money options on a change in the monetary climate. “I do like a low interest-rate policy, I must be honest with you.”

The Fed will start shrinking its balance sheet in 2017. Risk of collateral damage to toppy bond and stock markets? Put it out of your mind, counsel the mandarins.

Symbol is substance at the Federal Reserve. Poring through its new financials, an analyst may wonder, "Is it broke?"

Small, illiquid and hairy are the opportunities that remain in junk bonds after an eight-year visitation of the yield-munching locusts.

What SpaceKnow can't see from the high heavens is the continued disruption of a certain short-term funding market. Why the volcano smokes.

Too many used cars spell slower sales of new cars. February brings traffic jams in dealer lots to rival the congestion last seen in 2009.

An opportunity to reflect on what makes the municipal market so confoundedly phlegmatic.

The constant bid from passive investors delivered a remarkable calm in the just-ended quarter. Stormy weather to follow.

“There are just way too many assets chasing the sales,” says a man as wise—in this particular instance—as the Sage of Omaha himself. Ultra-low interest rates, high price/earnings ratios and credit markets fitted out with red carpets share the blame. No profits? No problem.

“The hedge fund isn’t an asset class. It is a compensation scheme.” It became an over-compensation scheme. Tracing the rise and ongoing pratfall of the modern-day hedge fund.

Bullishness dominated, though they did not quite monopolize, the day’s proceedings. A vision of 20 years on the investment equivalent of an exercise bicycle.

“Indexing doesn’t need any help. It is growing at an astonishing rate and, for someone who never intended to build a colossus, a kind of frightening rate.”

Where in life can a sub-par performer achieve average results with a light tap on a computer key? Investment indexation, attested a preeminent active investor, is “incredible.”

The text of your editor’s early-morning remarks: “The Age of Trump will go down as the Age of the Consequences of Radical Monetary Policy.”

A long and a short for a Trump Market where “what has worked so well in investing will fade or stop working.”

The word “gold” went unmentioned at the Plaza, except in the context of an unassailable rule for living: “Never stand in line to buy an asset.”

Yes, buying low and selling high is hard to do, but there are ways. “Trailing three-year performance is very predictive.”

To close the era of extraordinary monetary policy, the Federal Reserve must open its mind. “There is no wealth effect, only a wealth illusion.”

A pair of stocks in a country poised on the brink of capitalist emergence.

Other investment ideas presented by our speakers at the Spring 2017 Grant’s conference.

While the S&P 500 is near an all-time high, the much-vaunted wealth effect does not seem to be working its magic.

Remarks of Peter R. Fisher Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth *** Grant’s Interest Rate Observer Spring 2017 Conference New York, New York *** March 15, 2017

American consumer prices registered a year-over-year rise of 3.6% in February, according to the Web-scraping inflation detectives of the Billion Prices Project. More inflation is what the central bankers say they want. Cue the Disney cartoon classic, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice."

Never--at least not since the time of the Napoleonic Wars--has the bond market served up anything like the gains that risk-parity portfolios have earned these recent decades. Is it so farfetched that something new and different awaits us all?

Take a plunging VIX and a resurgent S&P. Add tight credit spreads, rock-bottom sovereign yields and a world-wide income famine. Voila: today's not so high-yield bond market. The worst of all fixed-income worlds.

Everyone is bullish on oil, though not so bullish as to lift the valuations of drillers whose survival depends on a $60 crude price. Nigeria on the cheap, the Arctic for a pittance. Widows and orphans, please avert your eyes.

Whom to thank for the magnificent returns in the post-2009 stock market? We furnish a mailing address.

A higher funds rate is all but in the books. What the central bankers may regret.

A pair of big, profitless, stockholder-defying American companies are building shiny new glass corporate offices with a common theme of sunshine. What the "fake moon landing guys" are demanding from Steve Mnuchin.

For long-range worry, imagine a Detroit that produces not 17 million new vehicles a year but three or four million (who needs a car in the Age of Autonomy?). For a timelier set of concerns, observe today's falling used-car prices, decaying credit metrics and at-risk auto lease market.

Last week, the first private alternative asset manager to go public became the first public alternative asset manager to declare its intention to go private--at less than one-half the 2007 IPO price. Could the business model use a tweak?

Only 43% of money managers believe in a future of persistently low growth and chronically droopy prices, just half as many as the year before. What ever happened to long-term investing?

A favorite Grant's income play has progressed from reasonably cheap to fully valued. While there are better examples of excess in the beautiful Trump stock market, "fully valued" is the amber light of investment.

The Trump administration is casting a creative eye on more than the trade data. Not so easily amendable is the flattening trend in bank lending and Federal Reserve credit.

In the 91st month of a business expansion comes a push to liberate the banks to lend and their customers to borrow. A speculation on the consequences of the possible liberation of $2 trillion. "Larry did a great job for me. He managed a lot of my money."

Ingenious humans can produce better products at lower prices. They can likewise transform low GAAP earnings into high non-GAAP earnings. Such intellects make their home at a certain iconic American manufacturer. But whither free cash flow?

Nowadays, Democrats and Republicans seem to hurl insults rather than arguments. Then, again, the delicate ears of the 21st-century partisans were never exposed to the blistering rhetoric of William Darrah Kelley (R., Pa.).

We return to a low-cost, option-laden play on the mismanagement of the world's monetary system. So much potential, yet – in the moment – such disappointment. A speculation on lemonade.

Credit constriction in China ripples far and even, even to the northern fringe of NAFTA-land.

President Trump resembles a heavily shorted common stock. The analysts despise the ticker and the company it stands for, yet the shares go up and up. Rallying, too, are the battered shares of sea-going shippers, the administration’s anti-trade agenda notwithstanding. A theory of unscripted events.

When you see colleague Evan Lorenz at the March 15 Grant’s Conference, kindly address him by his new title: Deputy Editor.

“Investors Bolt Mexico as Peso Enters Free Fall,” a Wall Street Journal headline of Jan. 11, is our journalistic call to arms, a 55.9% too-cheap peso our value observation. On a certain developing opportunity behind the projected Trumpian wall.

Should a disrupting enterprise be more efficient than its targeted disruptees? Spotlight on the consequences of uber-cheap capital.

In which we journalistically cover one short-sale candidate, propose another in its place. Since when did the technology industry become cycle-free?

Now that the economic expansion is passing the 91-month pole, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York urges Mr. and Mrs. America to borrow more money against the collateral of their home equity. Live and don’t learn.

A vision of the next tumultuous 12 months in 140 characters or less. For Janet Yellen and Jared Kushner there’s good news, bad news—and good news all over again.

The asset-allocation votes are in for 2017, and the results are confounding. You can defend one big idea or the other big idea, but hardly both at once. What coal owes to Chinese speculators.

In investing, timing is said to be everything. In value investing in far-away places, solvency—in fact—is everything. Kind words for a pariah.

Cometh the man (or the woman), cometh the hour. No worldwide web required.

Returning to the scene of an error in judgment, we are bullish all over again. Why a lift is in store for the Earth’s heaviest naturally occurring element.

Rages a new bull market in equanimity.