Archives
Here, at your fingertips, are more than 35 years’ worth of issues and articles. Search by date, company or keyword.
Dance of the boiled frogs
To understand the investment implications of the unnatural union of radical money printing and minuscule interest rates, it helps to see these times as the singularity they are.
Store of hope
A question for the bitcoin bulls. You believe you know what you are long. Have you given thought to what you are short?
Short this index
Introducing the new Grant’s index of blank-check-abetted public listings. It’s not meant for buying.
High-yield scrapings
If you turn over rocks, you can still find bonds in what little remains of the high-yield market.
Hallucinations? No, valuations
On the financial singularity of 2020 and this year’s runners-up in the “can-you-top-this” sweepstakes.
Merrie olde value
Bullish on a closed-end fund pursuing private-equity strategies (except one) with orphaned public companies.
Muni margin debt
Arbitrage instruments at the crowded intersection of low yields, underfunded liabilities and Covid-19 busted budgets.
Up with the uninvestable
Welcoming an imminent hedge against the inflation that hasn’t yet materialized and applauding a class of investments that are as attractive as they are notorious.
Bad actor no more
Bullish on a small and underappreciated miner that digs for gold – the old-fashioned kind.
Bonds for Mr. Powell
Bearish on a trio of leveraged borrowers whose debt deserves to be housed in the Fed’s portfolio.
Here to eternity
For the new creditors of a 200-year old Andean republic, it would be well if history were bunk.
Modern monetary mischief
“It’s not that deficits don’t matter, only that they don’t matter in the way most people think they do.”
Algos watching
“It’s a wonderful thing,” observed the leadoff speaker at the Fall 2020 Grant’s conference, “because TAM really can expand your fundamental valuation horizons in a dramatic way.”
Silver Lining, Inc.
Alternatives for the $75 trillion of institutional capital with nowhere else to go.
After the apocalypse
The stars are coming into alignment for a “classic deep-value investing cyclical story.”
QE is no vaccine
Worrisome is that “central bankers have bought into the myth that central banks are the only game in town, and that somehow, we look to central banks to solve all problems.”
‘The Fed happened’
If your starting point is a current yield of 1.89% and a duration of 8.4 years, “that is not a great setup and returns are going to be very muted going forward.”
Twist and shout
The four things you really need to know about the Covid-charged department of the biotech market.
Elegy for 23rd Street
As bad as things may look at the headline level, the microeconomic view from the street is worse.
High tech rarity
An American domiciled-stock with a market capitalization over $10 billion, net debt of less than 1.5 times trailing Ebitda that’s priced under 15 times earnings is a rarity in a very strange year.
He rang a bell
Unmasked, with flashing lights and a blaring brass band, Chair Powell is coming for your money.
Recession, we hardly knew ye
Paying our provisional respects, pending the cyclical coroner’s report, to the pandemic-cum-lockdown- induced recession of 2020.
Alice in Junkland
Bearish on a trio of evidently distressed issues that trade as if they were prime.
Banking on yield
For income with an acceptable level of risk, we return to a trio of known Grant’s picks to click
Inflation welcome wagon
Gone is ferocity in defense of the integrity of the currency. In its place is ferocity in defense of the debasement of the currency.
Better than zero
Bullish on an income-producing closed-end that holds out a fighting chance of a decent return on one’s capital.
Calling all cars
Bearish on a known Grant’s pick to not click and its rival with the trademark jumbo-vending machines.
Value, as in 'valuable'
Revisiting a certain value-themed investment fund situated in close proximity to, but at a distant analytical remove from, Silicon Valley.
Hoping for the best
If the recession is invisible, the government is omnipresent. Whether it shall remain so is the question.
Suddenly and then gradually
Reeling from a blow even crueler than that of 1975, America’s most populous city puts its underpaid creditors at risk.
Beyond yields
Leverage, and a discount to net asset value, are the main ingredients of the secret sauce for closed-end, tax-exempt bond funds.
Vestigial organs of the Federal Reserve
In the habitually unread fine print of the Fed’s statistical releases, reminders of where we’ve come from and the risks attending the direction we are going in.
So bad, it’s good
For stalwart seekers of deep value (including collectors of free options on the next inflation), a trio of equities in markets from which money is fighting to get out, not in.
Bankruptcy road map
Today’s state of play and the stages of the lockdown-induced bankruptcy and restructuring wave.
Chairman Powell meets Professor Goodhart
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Distortion, risk and opportunity lie ahead.
With compliments to Standard & Poor’s
There’s a better leading indicator than stock prices. Decoding the message of “stressed” leveraged loans.
Just supposing
Borrowing, spending and money creation are crowd-pleasers so far; why not turn the program up a notch?
Magic markers
A highly valued derivative of the private-equity bubble in no way deserves its fat multiple.
Central-bank vaccine
Bullish on a geologically highly leveraged prophylactic for the plague of novel monetary policy.
Made in Japan
On achieving “high single-digit returns while avoiding permanent loss of capital” in the Land of the Rising Sun.
Show us the money
The levitation of the home builders is well and good, but who’s going to make the mortgages?
Zero times zero equals $5.9 trillion
The overlay of zero percent interest rates on zero-cost stock speculation is the new force on Wall Street.
The oddest couple
A Harvard eminence and the 45th president of the United States share an interest-rate obsession.
Changing monetary places
An undervalued, underowned, inflation-resistant and coronus-immune asset—what might it be?
The price is wrong
The problem with price fixing is that even the right price becomes the wrong price as the world turns.
A short history of making things worse
The federalization of American finance didn’t come of a clear, blue, free-market sky.
Glass half-full
Bullish on a trio of gas-related securities. As noted two weeks ago in the pages of Grant’s, oil’s pain may be gas’s gain.
Empty skies
Bearish on a certain parts supplier with a strategy that has drawn unwanted comparisons to Bausch Health Companies, Inc., the renamed Valeant Pharmaceuticals International.
Savers shriek as Nintendo slashes rates
Is there no way to test radical policy without making us all guinea pigs?
That which is unseen
The TIPs market forecasts an average rate of inflation of 1.2% over the next 10 years. The Fed’s balance sheet (possibly on its way to $10 trillion), the federal budget deficit (pointing to $3.8 trillion) and broad money-supply growth (topping 12%) may suggest a different narrative. A “cold” inflation no more?
Not so radioactive
Burgeoning gluts of most everything the world over indicate that Covid-19 is crushing demand even faster than it’s disrupting supply. One commodity, at least, bucks the trend.
Value agonistes
A re-examination of the value school both from the top-down and the bottom up: interest rates, conditioned behavior and the cycles of taste and technology, on the one hand; a Marin County, Calif. value-investing partnership, lately the worse for wear, on the other.
Home fires burn
A hard look at a single-family rental business in which the insiders sell stock and the tenants lodge complaints. But a bright spot in vacation homes.
One side of the boat
Extreme bearish positioning—that and aggressive Federal Reserve bidding—account for the ferocity of a rally in stocks, investment-grade bonds and lesser credit instruments.
Credit virus superspreader
You might have thought that a decade’s patching and legislating would have mended the broken financial system. It turns out that things are more fragile than ever.
Typical but unprecedented
The yo-yo action in security prices is not the only fact that beggars historical comparison in this strange springtime.
America the homebound
On a certain homebuilder and on the safer of two income plays that featured in the prior issue of Grant’s, we remain bullish.
Lowering the boom
A provocative new report from Moody’s Investors Service clarifies the cost and warns of the resulting, looming difficulties to state and local governments of lower stock prices and lower (and lower and lower) interest rates.
Not-so-fine dining
Frozen bread, salad dressing, dips and croutons are its stock in trade. Bearish on a safety stock straight out of central casting.
Compared to what?
We are in uncharted waters and few real-time economic trackers are designed to deal with sharp, sudden stops in activity.
Biggest hearts, lowest rates
An interest-rate observer can only ask if the outpouring of central-bank credit, along with the promise of unstinted fiscal stimulus, is compatible with the lowest rates in 4,000 years.
To your health!
Investment bargains are few and far between in this era of nonstop QE. Speculating on a return to something like normalcy.
Storm in a port
Gold mines are the subject, and Grant’s is bullish on them. The question before the house is whether a critical mass of complacent dollar holders will come around to agree with us.
Interest-income trio
The market has crashed, and so have government-bond yields. Now where to turn for a modicum of income at an acceptable level of risk?
What the Fed does all day
With a new intervention almost every day, you may have lost track of what, exactly, goes on in the Eccles building
Ten-cent beers
On June 4, 1974, mispriced alcohol caused a riot at Cleveland’s old Municipal Stadium. Might ground-skimming interest rates not have a similar effect on Wall Street today?
Money’s green, too
On the environmental, social and governance approach to buying low and selling high, a pair of picks that we say do not, will not, cannot click.
Enrichment potential
Discouraged bulls may feel as if nothing has gone right, or right enough, but the news is better than the price action.
Diversity and inclusion at the Fed
It was the dissenting candidate, not the conforming one, who drew hostile attention from members of the Senate Banking Committee in last week’s job interview for the Federal Reserve Board.
Top of the heap
Never before have so many invested so much in so few. What the arc of the IBM share price may teach about the prospects for the S&P 5.
Hold the condiments
It’s an ill wind that blows no portfolio any good. A silver lining in the gathering storm clouds of triple-B-rated corporate bonds.
Gale-force liquidity
By one man’s reckoning, the six-month-old gust of Federal Reserve accommodation is the strongest since the fall of Lehman Brothers in 2008 and, before that, the attacks of 9/11. No such shocks whipped up today’s monetary winds.
About those p/e’s
The stock market is even richer than you think, said the front page of the prior issue of Grant’s. We reiterate our case with a simple example.
America the overvalued
Bullish on certain foreign companies and on a particular domestic situation with which the index-makers are happily uninvolved.
Grand tour of junk
Connecting fact with perception, perception with valuation and valuation with risk. “Hold on to your hats!” is the investment conclusion.
‘Low growth at a huge multiple’
What the indexed investor sees is not always what the indexed investor gets.
Truly sustainable investing
Newly issued by Artemis Capital Management, L.P., Austin, Texas, is a guide to investing after you (probably) won’t be around to attend to the details.
Energetic income
Opportunities in income-producing stocks that occupy the energy wing of the investment dog house.
Plastic refuse
Bearish on a debt-financed roll-up of roll-ups that stands at the intersection of minuscule interest rates and money-burning-a-hole-in-the-deal-doers’-pockets.
Not so stimulating
As the overclass gathers in Davos, Switzerland, the United States and Europe have at last found common ground.
Pennies in the fiscal fuse box
The history of the growth of the public debt is also the history of the failed attempts to control it.
Personal preference
You have cash and a problem: How to earn income with an acceptable level of risk?
Bull-market archetype
Bearish on a Midwest dividend aristocrat and wary on what its valuation and vulnerability may signify for the stock market as a whole.
Slow boat gains speed
It’s not hard to see the investment attraction. Yet, speculators betting on reflation may be disappointed.