I would estimate that I’ve spent less than an hour thinking about silver in my career, and most of it was preparing to write this. I had heard that silver was on a tear, as was gold, but even more so. I only looked at the last year, but the chart below shows that since early February 2025, ignoring Friday, gold has nearly doubled, and Silver was up 3.5x. The… Read More
We have all noticed that the S&P 500 has become unusually concentrated. What is less obvious is how today compares to earlier eras, simply because the data are harder to find. Bloomberg published a helpful chart over the weekend using the UBS Global Investment Returns 2025 Yearbook (Dimson, Marsh, and Staunton of London Business School), extending back to 1900. Because the series is incomplete before 1925, I anchored the analysis… Read More
Last week, I outlined the views of Joe Davis, Vanguard’s Chief Economist, who argues in his recent book that the economic and market outlook for the next decade largely hinges on whether AI delivers meaningful productivity gains. In the bull case, AI performs as hoped. Productivity improves, economic growth remains durable, markets benefit, and the US is better able to manage the risks associated with large and growing deficits and… Read More
A few months ago, I read Coming into View: How AI and Other Megatrends Will Shape Your Investments by Joe Davis, Vanguard’s Chief Economist. It’s a thoughtful book that I recommend. It isn’t overly technical, and it frames the biggest questions investors face today: AI, debt and deficits, demographics, potential deglobalization, and—hardest of all to measure—geopolitical risk. The core question Davis keeps returning to is deceptively simple: can AI generate… Read More
I’m amazed that the year-to-date return for all of the non-US stocks are up 26.2 percent, and the S&P 500 is ‘only’ up 15.7 percent. It seems like a long time since global stocks have outperformed the S&P 500, so I decided to do some digging. I started with a slightly different index than what I use in the market summary. The summary is all non-US stocks, but for further… Read More
We often say that we eat our own cooking, and I think everyone understands what we mean: we personally invest in the same strategies and products that we recommend to our clients. As fiduciaries, we’re already required to put our clients’ interests ahead of our own. Technically, I suppose it’s possible to meet that obligation while investing differently ourselves, but it wouldn’t make much sense. What we’re really saying is… Read More
Last week, I wrote about Alan Greenspan’s now-famous phrase, “irrational exuberance,” and made the case that timing the market is, at best, a fool’s errand. Greenspan uttered those words so early in the tech bubble that investors who sold after his warning and sat in cash ended up with roughly the same post-crash results as those who stayed invested through the rise and fall. This week, I found myself thinking… Read More
Many people are asking whether we’re in the middle of an AI bubble, and the answer, in my opinion, is probably yes. The much harder question is what to do about it. A recent analysis by Jason Furman, a Harvard economist and former Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama, calculated that 92 percent of economic growth in the first half of 2025 was related to data-center… Read More
For several years, Morningstar has released its annual Mind the Gap study, which highlights the difference between what a fund returns and the returns investors actually realize. The study underscores a familiar struggle: investors chase performance—jumping into funds after the best gains have passed, or bailing out during a slump only to miss the rebound. The penalty for this behavior is steeper than many realize. Over the 10 years ending… Read More
Perhaps one of the longest-running debates in the investment industry is the so-called “active vs. passive” debate. Most people understand it this way: Will active managers who pick stocks (or bonds) fare better than index funds? The industry of stock-pickers says yes; the index fund companies say no way. The name “passive” is just terrible. It sounds like nobody is doing anything, when in fact index investing is a reflection… Read More
