E Greek To Me?
“It’s all Greek to me”, commented subscriber PM about my note yesterday. So for those not familiar with current stock market jargon, here are some definitions of alpha and beta. Technically speaking, they are both ratios used as statistical measurements for calculating returns and risk against a benchmark. They are part of the Capital Asset […]
The Folly Of Discounted Cash Flow Analysis
The value of any asset is the sum of its future cash flows discounted to present value. People make investments to generate more money in the future. The ‘more money’ is future cash flows. No one would buy an asset that will generate $10 in future cash flows for $20. You would lose money. An […]
Warning: Don’t Let Market Hype Cause You To Miss This Total Return Opportunity
Introduction Since the Great Recession of 2008 came to an end, the stock market, as measured by the S&P 500, is almost midway through the 7th year of a strong bull run. This marks today’s bull market as the third longest in US history. Considering how traumatizing the Great Recession and the accompanying stock market […]
Annual cost of car ownership falls to $8,698
Owning a car isn’t cheap. First, there’s the price of the vehicle, which now hovers north of $30,000, on average. Then there’s the cost of maintenance, which can be a real headache in some parts of the country. Tack on the price of insurance, fuel, and the occasional pair of fuzzy dice, and you’ve got […]
WSJ Economists’ Forecasts For 10-Year Yields And The Fed Funds Rate – May 18, 2015
The Fed minutes of its March 17-18 policy meeting released last week was were generally viewed by the popular financial press as showing a split in the FOMC on the timing of a rate hike. The Wall Street Journal has now made available its April survey of economists on key economic indicators. At this point only 19 percent […]
The San Francisco Fed Just Gave A Green Light For A June Rate Hike
Back on March 3, it was none other than a Federal Reserve bank, that of Atlanta, which as we first reported shocked the world or at least those permabullish, consensus-chasing, Wall Street weathermen-cum- economists who assume that a world with $200 trillion in debt will grow at the same CAGR as a world without 4 times […]
Interest Rates Spiking Everywhere
Just as negative interest rates start to seem normal, the markets decide otherwise. US 10-year Treasury bonds, for instance, yielded about 1.9% in April and are now above 2.20%. As CNBC presents it: And the trend reversal isn’t limited to the US. Across Europe and Asia rates have spiked in the past month. From Bloomberg: What does […]
Bull Of The Day: Trinseo S.A.
Trinseo S.A. (TSE – Snapshot Report) reorganized their business into two new divisions as of January 1, 2015, and were quickly rewarded with strong earnings numbers in the first quarter of implementation. This reorg consisted of creating the Performance Materials segment, and the Basic Plastics & Feedstocks segment; which saw improved profitability, and accelerated growth for the company […]
How Inflation Affects Your Future
“The arithmetic makes it plain that inflation is a far more devastating tax than anything that has been enacted by our legislature. The inflation tax has a fantastic ability to simply consume capital. It makes no difference to a widow with her savings in a 5 percent passbook account whether she pays 100 percent income […]
