Capital Flows and Asset Markets

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.russell-clark.com Subscriber George Noble has asked me to come and speak at a X (twitter) space this Friday, 4pm London time. My first time on a Twitter Space - and if you have some uncontrollable urge to hear me speak for more than 10 minutes - then this is your chance! As mentioned previously, I was caught off guard by the OPEC in...

Fund management is a funny game. Every manager has a different style, but typically people think a hedge fund manager needs to have a wall of screens to be able to track all the different markets. Whenever I see a set up like this - I feel like someone is trying to represent frenetic activity as an alternative to thinking and strategy (the big car/small car analogy comes to mind). Also most people...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.russell-clark.com I like having a strategy to attack markets with. When you have a strategy, you can makes adjustments to improve it as you get new information. In my career as an analyst and fund manager from 2004 to 2021, I was very heavily macro focused, because that was what worked. But from 2016 onwards, it stopped working. Cur...

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One of my pet topics, and related to my “pro-labour” views on politics, was that I expected fertility rates to rise. I know that there a number of readers who follow this, and have sent me various articles on this. For new readers, the argument for an imminent baby boom centres to two observations. Firstly, rising wages and steady employment and more opportunities to work from home should all act...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.russell-clark.com The old finance joke is that trading works in practice but not in theory, while macro works in theory, but not in practice. Macro investing in general has been pretty poor in my experience. I had my best success when I looked at what worked from a trading perspective - and THEN worked out the macro that explained w...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.russell-clark.com I know a lot of people and investors have been left confused by this month. How can we have “Liberation Day Tariffs” tank the market, a treasury market crisis, surging gold price, and basically have market back to flat? Has nothing really changed? Was it just a fever dream? Is it just buy the dip to infinity? For m...

During the crisis years of 2008 to 2011, investors learnt that safe assets (or risk free assets) were US Treasuries, JGBs, German bunds, US Dollar, Yen and Swiss Franc. Yen in particular had a very strong propensity to rally over this period. The long end of the JGB market also had the tendency to rally (yield falls) when there was trouble in markets. The meant that the dollar returns to owning a...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.russell-clark.com Its been a long time since we have had a real bear market in the US. For me, its looks like more of slope of hope, where rallies are there to be sold.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.russell-clark.com Let be clear - I am not a “gold bug”. In fact I used to make fund of gold bugs all the time. Fred Hickey, who apparently was a “technology strategist” used to devote most of his newsletter to gold, and gold mining stocks, while missing the greatest bull run in tech stocks ever seen. Long gold miners, while recommen...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.russell-clark.com For the first time in many years, currency is making a big difference to my portfolio. I have always had a heavy currency focus, and even in my current portfolio I have a big currency position - but I have never had any reason to to talk about it - until today.

Ronnie O’Sullivan may or may not be the greatest snooker player of all time - but he is probably the most naturally gifted. Snooker is a very slow game - and achieving a perfect score is vanishingly rare. Ronnie has the distinction of the fastest ever perfect score . If you wanted to carry on the Ronnie analogy, like Ronnie, I burst on to the scene, did great things, then suffered a form slump, re...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.russell-clark.com It has been a tumultuous couple of weeks. I will make some general observations to start, and then some market observations behind the paywall at the end. * American First politics in practice, particular in regards to Ukraine, but with the application of tariffs as well, has probably ended the various independence...

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I did a market update with Maggie Lake yesterday. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.russell-clark.com/subscribe

President Trump has said he wants two things - lower energy prices and lower interest rates. I suspect that he assumed causing the stock market to crash with his “Liberation Day” tariffs would help get both. Together with a surprise increase in OPEC production, he definitely got lower oil prices. WTI is down USD20 a barrel from January highs. With market down nearly 20% from all time highs in Febr...

Just a quick post. I have been bearish on Treasuries for a while. Why? I see investor mindset has completed changed on fixed income from 10 years ago. Back then, no one thought buying a 30 year Treasury at 4% was a sensible trade, but when yields moved to 1% during Covid, everyone became convinced of their ability to rally when thing are bad. But for me bonds reflect politics - and politics is no...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.russell-clark.com Wondering whether it is time to change strategy might seem like a very odd thing to say. If I had to estimate year to date performance as of close Friday, it would be up as much as MSCI world is down, but with a net pretty close to neutral. Pretty good. So what is the problem?

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.russell-clark.com Some surprisingly big moves in the core theme of the portfolio. What do they mean?

We are living in times of profound change. What I am trying to do with Brumby Capital is capture the opportunity of those changes. I have set up a website - www.brumbycapital.com - that includes a beta version of AI Persona for the fund. You can speak to it, and it answers in an Australian accent. Please give it a go and give me feedback on where we can improve it. At some point I hope to train it...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.russell-clark.com It has been a busy month. Not only were markets volatile, I combined this with a trip to New York. While the performance was very good, more than anything it was a validation of the analysis. This gives me more clarity on where we are going, and how we are going to get there. As I now realise the importance of poli...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.russell-clark.com As part of my launch of Brumby Capital - I spent two days in NYC meeting a selection of subscribers and ex-investors. Now you would think that these trips would be all about raising capital. And they are - but I take a longer view on these things. If I tell people what I think is going to happen - and how I plan to...

In my school days, the constant criticism I used to get was not showing my working - to which I would reply, but its so obvious why would anyone need to see that? I have learnt, that showing your working is a good way to avoid mistakes - so I do try and show my working these days. Below is my effort to explain my view of why we are moving to an era of capital scarcity. There are three interconnect...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.russell-clark.com I have written a series of post on how “ Short Selling Sucks ” and generally speaking, I make fun of short sellers as the biggest bunch of losers in financial history. So you may be wondering, why do people make a big song and dance about short selling? Well, when it works it is like magic.

Back when I first started writing this substack, one of my first questions I was asking myself, was why had JGB yield stopped falling? During the Covid crisis - a huge potential deflationary bust - JGB yields starting rising very early on and have kept going. My view remains Japanese investors are very clued on on inflation vs deflation trends. I wondered what they saw. One of the first things I f...