Last Tuesday night was a special night. I was having some out of state friends that I had not seen for over a year meet my wife and me for dinner. I picked out an outstanding restaurant with a wide deck perched on the tip of one of Michigan’s gorgeous fresh water lakes. I got the last table available for the 6:30 p.m. seating. Continue reading
It’s hard to tell which to be most worried about – the Chinese spying on us through their computer hacking or the government spying on us through all our data providers! To paraphrase Jay Leno’s remark the other night, “Voters said they wanted a government that listened to them– now they’ve got one!” Continue reading
Normally, May is a perfect time to visit New York City. The snow is gone, spring is in the air, Broadway readies for its Tony celebration, and people just seem friendlier. While there were plenty of friendly vibes from the populace when I visited on FPI business last week, and it is a super season on Broadway (“Motown” and “Kinky Boots” look to lead the list of new musicals – they were terrific), the weather was abysmal – cold and very rainy. They even had snow in parts of New York as the weekend began. Continue reading
I’m off to New York City tomorrow to work on some new services for Flexible Plan Investments, Ltd., that I will soon be able to tell you about. One of the new innovations that I can talk about is our newest sub-advised mutual fund, The Gold Bullion Strategy Fund.
Wow, another Mother’s Day. They can really get to you, especially when your Mom is 92 and everyone else of her generation in the family is gone.
Let’s discuss impulse buying. Studies show that impulse buying is based on fear of loss,
urgency, and what I call Jones-ism. The threat of losing an opportunity, the immediacy of the threat, and keeping up with the Joneses can all lead to impulse buying.
That’s impulse buying—but doesn’t impulse selling tend to arise from the same motivations?
As is the case every quarter, a small percentage of clients close their accounts. I was surprised, however, this last quarter that a number of these clients had only been invested with us for less than a quarter. Almost 19% had been with us less than a year. 55% of the terminations were from clients starting since the end of 2011—just fifteen months ago. These clients left us in a quarter that saw the stock market post gains and most of our strategies post very good results.
Systematic Long/Short Bond Trading (SLSBT) continued to be long during April. The inflation submodel, having been neutral since February, turned bearish on bond yields during the month based on the observation that there might be slackening demand + production worldwide creating downward price pressure on manufacturing inputs. The risk-on/off submodel continued to signal risk aversion and to maintain a long position in treasuries. April was a positive month for the program as yields fell in response to weak readings on the economy where the pace of jobs creation appears to be slowing in addition to weak GDP growth.
Studies show that the longer something has existed, the longer it is likely to continue to exist. Check out Chapter 20 of Nassim Taleb’s latest book, Antifragile.