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Here, at your fingertips, are more than 35 years’ worth of issues and articles. Search by date, company or keyword.
Exit, a humble giant
Paul A. Volcker, born in 1927, opened his eyes to the world of the gold dollar, fixed exchange rates and a balanced federal budget. He died in an age of the fiat dollar, floating (or manipulated) exchange rates and a trillion-dollar boomtime deficit. Monetary history, seen in a certain way, makes a long, coherent arc.
Year-end review
An annotated list of our 2019 investment ideas, bonds and stocks, currencies, metals, longs and shorts, profitable and otherwise.
Old Ma Dividend
Looming large over Main Street and Wall street alike, the old milch cow is riskier than she looks.
Bond math recalculated
Figures quoted from a Bloomberg report in the Nov. 29 issue of Grant’s greatly understate prospective gains.
Inside the yield factory
At worst, they are the devil’s own contraptions. At best, they’re lucrative income machines. Anticipating a brighter 2020 for the rare fixed-income asset that can hurt when interest rates go up or when they go down.
Still not 'cheep'
Grant’s remains bearish on the brick-and-mortar-only discount retailer trading at nearly 33 times trailing earnings.
‘Safety’ in numbers
It’s not the prices, yields, CUSIPs, call dates, ratings, etc. that are in dispute. What fluctuates is the fiscal and monetary narrative around the facts.
Dividends at risk
In the past half-decade, the estimated value of the “most valuable” retail building in the world has plunged by 57%. If it can happen to the Manhattan Taj Mahal of Saks Fifth Avenue, it can happen to other top-flight retail assets including the investments held by a pair of Grant’s picks-not-to-click.
Seaborne leverage
We remain bullish on a pair of known Grant’s favorites and sing the praises of a second pair of companies which, in the ESG world, are only slightly more reputable than cigarette makers and arms dealers.
Going our seperate ways
A downshift in the synchronization of world business activity may hold an unpleasant surprise for the mass of bond bulls.
Monetary New Year's party
“The Fed did not just stabilize the repo market,” a wise woman writes. “Now, it is the repo market.” Potentially very bullish in the short run, potentially very bearish in the long run.
Take my well, please
To many an investor, oil and gas has come to resemble the cigarette business, only without the pricing power. But a particular segment of the energy market looks like nothing so much as value Disneyland
Bank of the Cycle
Grant’s casts a skeptical eye on the superlative record of the institution that stands athwart the with-it world of high-tech venture capital.
Just a stumble
We acknowledge our hapless timing and reiterate our bullish judgment on a hard-pressed pick-to-click.
Sucker punch
Market sentiment turned on a dime when the Fed committed to buying $60 billion of Treasury bills every month.
Interest rates on wheels
Its business model depended on everything we’ve learned about transportation economics being totally wrong.
Recession, ahoy!
What we’re seeing is something very unusual taking place in the context of what is supposed to be an expanding global economy,” observed David Rosenberg, leadoff speaker at the Fall 2019 Grant’s conference, “and where do you think bond yields are going to go if the stock market crashes?
Progress of the age
Cascading digital progress just may cause inflation "to be structurally lower (and earnings growth and valuations structurally higher) than history may predict."
‘Your biggest mistake’
The greatest correlated belief of institutional and intelligent investors probably in the past 25 years is in the most wonderful asset class ever invented.
Bums’ rush
Low cost is actually a very costly decision, and that passive thing is acting quite aggressively.
Fall and redemption
The strange thing about technology is it is a badge of honor to get completely wiped out as long as you come back.
The great debate
While it can’t be said that the 10th president of the New York Fed and your editor agreed on everything, they did concur that money is not humanity’s best subject.
Large, unbeatable numbers
The cycle’s signature big-spending, go-for-growth business model is a co-product of the cycle’s signature low interest rates, but there are non-monetary limits to profitless revenue expansion.
Community activists
Profitable, sound and well-capitalized are a quartet of Grant’s picks to click, though you wouldn’t know it from the “limited engagement” of the buy side, or what might otherwise be characterized as nobody much caring.
Promiscuity runs rampant
It isn’t every day a CEO pens a 10-page, 4,989-word letter to explain disappointing quarterly results.
Adam Smith in airplane mode
Confusion is the time for the classics, and how much more confused could we be?
Rx for income
Assuming the removal of existential corporate threats – and there can be no guarantees, of course – the bonds of a certain banged-up drug manufacturer offer the potential for double-digit returns.
The yield verdict is in
Interest rates did not just fall, the journalistic evidence suggests, the central banks pushed them. Applying heavy leverage to negative-yielding sovereign debt.
Wages of sin
Bullish on a pair of pariahs that change hands near eight year lows with dividend yields at record spreads to Treasurys and earnings multiples in the single digits.
Burn notice
Twenty IPOs with a combined market cap of $164.5 billion that fail to generate free cash flow. Counting the fiscal quarters till extinction.
‘Bizzle’ watch
There’s a word for the prosperity of the barnacles that cling to the bottoms of stately venture-capital promotions.
Just in case
On the sources and uses of volatility, a sampling of ideas and value propositions intended to engage amateur and professional alike.
Whipsaw Tuesday
Have you heard this before? The long bull market in bonds just might be nearing its end.
The surprise factor
Conditioned to believe that someone’s in charge, we factored out the unexpected. On the physics of Coors Field.
‘Epitome of the cycle’
We remain bearish on the first-ever experiment in late-stage venture capital combined with private equity combined with a transaction tempo resembling that of a fast-paced hedge fund.
Gilt by association
A quartet of stocks of the smallish, illiquid and hairy type. Value is returning to Britai
‘Buy,’ we said
We write to acknowledge an error of judgment, gather appropriate lessons and glare into the future.
Bonfire of the yields
Yen for yen and euro for euro, no balance sheets make more mischief than the ones deployed by the sponsors of today’s negative nominal yields. What’s safe about a guaranteed loss?
‘Big passion project’
A high-risk, still early-stage arbitrage play between the divergent prices of crude oil and natural gas.
Incumbency advantage
In the contest between, on the one hand, the merits of free cash flow and, on the other, the prospective fruits of business disruption, the innovators are pledging to build a new industry on the ashes of the old one.
No cheese whiz
A known Grant’s pick-to-not-click previews the problems in relisting pricey leveraged buyouts.
The story of 24 hours
With everything that is going on, the most noteworthy item is what China is not doing.
The best economist on the lowest rates
Harnessing a formidable body of work to solve the mystery of today’s topsy-turvy bond market and to answer the question “have bond prices reached a permanently high plateau?”
Monetary jumping bean
This former Grant’s pick-to-click had 36% sawed off its share price. Seven lean years later, we reaffirm our bullishness.
Raising the roof
“Existing” home sales for May fell by 1%, the 15th consecutive monthly decline, while June housing permits dropped by 7%. Even so, a hopeful look at the housing situation and a bullish analysis of a certain homebuilder.
Mr. Market’s fiscal escape route
Unbalanced operating budgets, seemingly hopeless deficits in pension funding, relentless out-migration, fearsome property taxes, irksome gasoline taxes, the threat of soak-the-rich income taxes – you wonder where it will lead, and when.
Model trains
Few have made money by approaching the ill-managed cyclicals of yesteryear from the vantage point of reversion-to-the-mean – or with the attitude that the shelf life of any management cult is finite. Maybe it’s time.
Art of the exit
You’d be excused for assuming that anybody and her sister-in-law could close a private-equity deal, but exiting is another story. Is the public market ready to receive a zombie mouse?
Scooping the CPI
Monday’s Wall Street Journal birthday supplement marking the 120th anniversary of the first edition of Charles Dow and Edward Jones rather buried the lead.
‘IOER’ made easy
The Federal Reserve cut rates on May 1, not that you would know that from perusing the president’s tweets. Herewith an exploration of an important, if recondite, corner of U.S. monetary policy.
Trillions seek stable home
A speculation on the end game of this extraordinary chapter in monetary affairs.
172 years young
The apple of Grant’s eye can ride out a recession or to continue to prosper in the absence of one.
Mega-style drift
It must mean something when low-cost Vanguard eyes the high-fee private-equity business.
All in favor
In monetary matters, Mike Pence agrees with Donald Trump. And because Larry Summers agrees with Pence, it follows that the former president of Harvard University is on the same page as the sitting commander-in-chief. A hardened consensus of financial opinion ought not to be comforting.
Long-shot nation
A gamble on the long-running inflation-devaluation-corruption-default-recession-statism champion of the Western Hemisphere.
Curve ball
What the historical record suggests for an investment strategy in the 12 months following an inversion of the 10-year/3-month yield curve.
Fresh faces for America’s currency
An action plan to advance the cause of monetary diversity in America.
In which we erred
In the issue of Grant’s dated May 3, we had bullish things to say about a trio of baby bonds that yielded more than 6%. We wrote before we truly understood what we were talking about.
New misery index
Presenting the New Grant’s Misery Index. For a financialized America in which the S&P 500 has taken over the national mood.
Small big bet
China’s “special administrative region” isn’t your father’s Hong Kong and confidence is the most important kind of capital.
Total addressable hope
The levitating share prices of a pair of hot stocks may point to the certain and final automation of the bond market – or to nothing more newsworthy than the familiar fact that EZ money is good for the stock market.
Just call it the ‘bizzle’
History may remember these times as a golden age of invention and entrepreneurship, but those flattering descriptors should come with an asterisk. Introducing the bezzle’s first cousin.
For steeper and choppier
A fund for anyone who expects, or dreads, a reversal of the steady states of being in fixed income today.
Free interest rates!
On May 7, the editor of Grant’s addressed the Bradley Foundation Prize event in Washington, D.C. What’s to be done about Jack Daniel’s-grade financial disinhibitors?
On your honor
Across the Atlantic, a controversial fund and its founder presage trouble for America’s illiquid-securities business.
Buried alive in ‘Businessweek’
Things have come to such a sorry pass for the ancient scourge of paper money that Bloomberg BusinessWeek has written its obituary. Inflation dead declaims the April 22 cover story. “Dormant” is the word, we demonstrate.
Energy super-bulls
“When this is all over, every publicly traded Permian Basin name will be taken over.” Herewith the meaning of the word “this,” along with an assortment of bullish investment ideas related to that suggestive pronoun.
Corporate debt pre-mortem
A must-read anticipatory analysis of what will go wrong in the next, yet unscheduled, financial train wreck.
Risk and reward
Wary of both the income famine and the private-equity boom that prompt the outpouring of middle-market corporate debt, we nonetheless find bullish words for a pair of business development companies and a triplet of BDC baby bonds.
Let’s emulate China
Doubtful advice from the senior, non-voting kibitzer of American monetary policy.
In the words of Paul Krugman
Propounded by the economist Abba Lerner, modern monetary theory is an old thing made new. A close and lucid reasoner was Lerner, but his disciples? Not a model, rather an “attitude.”
Lifting the veil
Half of the moon is dark, but 85% of the leveraged-loan market is shrouded. Shedding a new bright light on the credit profile of that $1.1 trillion accident-waiting-to-happen.
‘It is not a cycle’
“China will elect to float the renminbi,” speculated Russell Napier, leadoff speaker at the Spring 2019 Grant’s Conference, “and a jarring deflationary shock will quickly give way to rip-roaring global inflation.”
The power of ideas
“If you pay a price expecting an incremental reinvestment of 14% and it’s on its way to 7%, it can be an expensive lesson.”
Outside the lines
“I’m looking forward to having my Warhol Campbell’s Soup painting arrive at my doorstep in an Amazon van.”
FOMO headed here
“You will get new highs on all of the averages,” observed Wall Street’s best stock-market technician.
Muse to central bankers
On money and banking and the duty of a central bank to clean up after a boom: Thoughts from the Greatest Victorian prove especially timely.
Deflation on the brain
“You don’t need much of an increase in inflation to change the market tone of TIPS, because expectations right now are a deflationary kind of thing.”
A retiring country
“In Mexico, people retire when they are 72 years old, in Brazil at 59, so this is an impossible system.”
Interest-rate overview
Seated with your editor onstage at the Plaza, the financial market historian Richard Sylla came prepared with a multi-millennia view.
‘It just ain’t so’
“You can have no certainty that stocks will beat bonds over multi-decade intervals,” our speaker informed the Grant’s audience, “and I would not assume that you can get 6.6% real in stocks.”
To the gnomes of Zurich
On April 4, the editor of Grant’s addressed the wealth-management forum of the Swiss publication Finanz und Wirtschaft. Opportunities abound from central bank manipulation.
Class of 1929
You have money to invest, but stocks are trading near all-time highs and investment-grade bonds, half of which are rated a single notch away from junk, yield a measly 3.7%. A trio of closed-end funds, trading at deep discounts to NAV, offer the value-minded, bubble-phobic investor a fighting chance.
Standing on a box
A little-known fact about unicorns is that they feed on interest rates. They like low, little rates – the tinier, the better. What do unicorns, the humans of private equity and the bulls of Wall Street all have in common?
Cost of low rates
In the post-2008 bull markets, think of the “everything bubble” as the moon overhead. We see but one side, the assets. It’s the obverse, the liabilities, that cry out for attention.
Monetary pain points
A speculation on the investment consequences of the central bankers’ big ideas.
Don't look down
All about a business strategically situated at the intersection of ingenuity, credit, price control and bull-market psychology.
The ‘Post’ rates New York
“Strong budgetary management” is not what you think of first when you gaze upon City Hall.
Can’t stand 1%
Corporate rivets begin to pop when the real rate of interest approaches even 100 humble basis points.
Not so ‘cheep’
On perhaps the greatest retail stock of the 21st century, we make bold to be bearish.
Eyes unblinkered
If the pulse on which Grant’s has its finger is indeed the pulse of investor sentiment, credulity is a short sale. A speculation on a turn in the Wall Street zeitgeist
The great non sequitur
The trouble with investing in the 21st century is that you become blasé about the quirks of the age. Before you know it, you start to think, well, negative-yielding debt isn’t so bad. Someone’s buying it.
All ahead full
You can have low prices and bad news or high prices and good news, but you can’t have low prices and good news. A survey of the opportunities in ocean-going shipping.
Dim the lights
Safety is inherent in no investment. And not in the securities of many a putatively safe and secure American electric utility. A demonstration of how little utilities in general, and one utility in particular, answer the description of port in a storm.
Dueling prices
We continue to identify Masayoshi Son’s corporate creation as one of the top contenders for the unwanted cyclical crown of Least Likely to Succeed.
How to stop a bear market
January was one for the record books with RMB 4.6 trillion ($687 billion) in new credit issued to Chinese borrowers. What ever happened to Xi Jinping’s deleveraging drive?
An open letter to Bill Dudley
What I was writing to tell you is that the Fed is technically insolvent.
Political risk in America
Even if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez winds up losing the 2020 presidential election, one tax-related shock looms unavoidable. A survey of deeply discounted opportunities in a bond market not exactly overflowing with bargains.
Fast food take out
You could almost say – we’ll say it – that the tribulations of the American restaurant industry are a mirror to the 2019 state of the Union. A parable of ultra-low interest rates and put-upon franchisees.
Out with the old
If all goes according to plan, the post-Libor transition will be the money market’s own version of the anticlimactic, year-2000 computer-clock changeover, Y2K.
Growth? Not much
After opening up the taps to businesses in December, bankers are having second thoughts.
A 500-year bull market shows its age
It’s nobody’s idea of breaking news that interest rates have tended to rise and fall in generation-length intervals. More striking is a young scholar’s contention that these decades-long undulations are only the wavelets of a half-millennium decline, a trend that will carry to still lower lows in the next recession.
Peak superhero
Creative destruction costs money, as the holders of low-yielding debt in heavily encumbered businesses may presently be reminded.
Hospitalized biotech stocks
Illiquid, unfollowed, undesired and battered, micro-cap biotech stocks tick nearly every contrarian’s boxes.
On returning to life as the stock market
The man who could topple the Commander-in-Chief is himself constrained by a greater power.
No waiting required
Netflix, Inc. was the best-performing stock in 2018, with a total return of 39%. It is also the only FAANG to generate negative free cash flow. Herewith a connection between these facts and a collection of stocks that just might excel in 2019.
Lottery Tickets, Inc.
The rolling-up of the red carpet of liquidity makes for winners and losers alike. Within this varied grouping, a trio of investment candidates, of which the reader will confront the daunting vocabulary that redirected many a would-be doctor to
Sacrificial securities
Suspense remains the order of the day for the Old Continent’s banks and their black-and-blue shareholders.
Dancing in the dark
This poses a conundrum for the Federal Reserve: Our money mandarins are “data dependent,” or so they tell us, but on what data can they rely?