I first wrote about Bitcoin in 2017 and concluded that it probably wasn’t a good investment, but maybe my grandkids would be mad at me because I didn’t buy them a coin for $4,300. A little more than six years later, I’m a little mad at myself as the price is about ten times today. But I’m not actually mad because I don’t see it as a good investment, even though… Read More
I wasn’t sure what I was going to write about this week and thought about simply starting with a picture of inflation, as measured by the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure, the core Personal Consumption Expenditure, or PCE. Like the core Consumer Price Index, core PCE strips out food and energy prices because they are so volatile, but don’t really change the numbers of the long run. Said, another way, they… Read More
Private investments, or simply ‘privates’ in the current vernacular, are among the hottest investments in recent years. Private investments, which are often considered one of the most prominent alternative investments, means owning securities that aren’t publicly traded. Private markets can include equity (stocks), credit (bonds), and real estate. Each major group has subcategories. Private equity can be venture capital, buyout equity, or growth equity. Credit can mean direct loans, mezzanine… Read More
When I was in high school, Japan Inc. seemed invincible. Their economy was booming, which pushed up their real estate and stock markets, and a handful of over-the-top events like the purchase of Rockefeller Plaza by Japanese investors and the sale of Van Gogh’s Portrait of Doctor Cachet sold for $82.5 million (or $189.5 million in today’s dollars). From 1970-1989, the Japanese stock market, according to MSCI, gained 16.9 percent… Read More
Chris and Cliff forwarded me an article last week asking: what would you do with your portfolio if you knew what was coming? The article referenced the still unresolved debt-ceiling situation and proceeded to list many pretty lousy events over the past 30 or so years. It made me think of a chart we made when we started Acropolis with small images depicting awful news with the growth of a… Read More
September will mark the 25th anniversary of the failure of the massive hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), and my podcast feed is filling up with retrospectives. One podcast featured Roger Lowenstein, the author of When Genius Failed, which is considered the definitive work on the subject. I read it when it came out in 2000 and once again in subsequent years, and it’s a great book that I thoroughly enjoyed…. Read More
Acropolis was an early adopter of exchange-traded funds (ETFs). As the name implies, an ETF is a fund that trades on an exchange. It’s like a mutual fund in that it is generally diversified, but like a stock, it trades throughout the day. When we got going in 2002, ETFs were about ten years old. The first version was State Streets Spyder, which still trades today with the ticker SPY…. Read More
Over the past five years, the hottest investments have all had the word ‘private’ in front of them: private equity, private credit, and private real estate. Private investments, or ‘privates’ as they are colloquially known, buy whole companies or properties or make direct loans to companies. When they buy companies or properties, the private fund managers can change management, business strategy, capital structure, or anything else that will allow them… Read More
I’ve been accused of repeating myself, and, in truth, it’s a fair accusation. Today I want to show a chart that I’ve shown before. Instead of showing the total growth of the stock market over time, where the good drowns out the bad, I want to highlight the bad. I don’t want to scare anyone; I actually think it’s reassuring. The measure I’m showing is called a drawdown, which shows… Read More
Over the weekend, I was looking at some research from JP Morgan that showed the percentage weight of the top ten stocks in the S&P 500 over time, and I admit that I was surprised. When we started Acropolis, 20-years ago in August, the top ten stocks made up about 24 percent of the index. I thought that was pretty high back then and was one of the reasons that… Read More
