Eye On The Market

A reflection on the 2024 election and who tells your story. On Trump’s victory: market implications of a supply side boost from deregulation clashing against inflationary impulses of tariffs and deportations. The ten year Treasury will be the most reliable barometer of all. To conclude, an ode to vaccines and an RFK bibliography.

For participants in the China equity rebound trade: once you hit your return targets, take the money and run. Click here to read the full PDF and view the video.

Candidate policy comparisons in a historically polarized US Election; China stimulus package The US is about to conduct its most polarized Presidential election in 100 years. Today’s note looks at candidate policy differences and implications for investors: government spending, taxation, tariffs, trade, immigration, regulation, NATO, energy, price controls and the Electoral College. We conclude wi...

NVIDIA and its GPU customers are now a large driver of equity market returns, earnings growth, earnings revisions, industrial production and capital spending. View video here

A surge in the Japanese Yen is resulting in home repatriation of Yen-funded positions overseas, and close-out of Yen-funded positions abroad. While Google was found guilty of home bias anti-competitive search engine behavior, any judicial remedies may be worse for recipients of Google’s “shelf space” payments than for Google itself. Work-from-home trends have plateaued at ~30%, which has important...

From 1930 to 2010, there were six extended periods of small cap outperformance as it dominated large cap over that entire period. But since 2010, small cap sits alongside value stocks and non-US stocks in the unholy trinity of underperforming portfolio strategies. While poor profit fundamentals argue against a prolonged period of outperformance vs large cap, small cap stocks are at their cheapest...

The Supreme Court vs the Regulatory State. Recent Supreme Court rulings may now usher in the largest pushback on the regulatory state since the Reagan Administration. A look at the end of Chevron deference, a revised statute of limitations for challenging government regulations, the Major Questions Doctrine, the right to a jury trial and a District Court injunction against Biden’s LNG export morat...

Investing in professional sports leagues and related businesses. As rules around private equity ownership of sports leagues expand, we review team valuations and profitability, emerging sports categories, streaming and broadcast revenues, the decline of regional sports networks, drivers and comparisons of league parity, relegation and financial pressures in the English Premier League, stadium subs...

With spring planting season having arrived in Zone 7, it’s a good time to review agriculture from an investor’s perspective. Topics include agricultural price inflation in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; public and private equity investments in agriculture, farmland ownership and the drivers of farmland returns; seed bio-engineering designed to reduce consumption of fertilizer, fungicide...

Cicadian Rhythms: the fading prospects of a US disinflationary boom; Japan’s structural reform/M&A emergence; and Eye on the Market mailbag responses to questions on Tesla/Musk, GLPs, housing, China, Truth Social and Meta’s latest open source model View video here

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: an investor lens on tech valuations, AI, energy and the US Presidential Election. View video here

This Eye on the Market is about the predominant vision for the future which involves the electrification of everything, powered by solar, wind, transmission and distributed energy storage. View video here

Five Easy Pieces: on Magnificent 7 stocks, open source large language models, the No Labels movement, the Armageddonists and bottom-fishing in Chinese equities. View video here

This Eye on the Market is about all the things that can be true at the same time. The collapse of the political middle in Congress should not be an excuse for everyone else to abandon the ability to believe things that may appear contradictory, but which are all part of a more complicated reality. View video here

A top ten list on what might happen… not what will happen, in honor of strategist Byron Wien View video here

The impact of weight loss drugs on equity markets. View video here

Falling US inflation and possible Fed easing are increasing talk of a soft landing rather than a hard landing and bear market. Our 2024 Outlook takes a closer look at equities, fixed income, China, Japan, antitrust, weight loss drugs and ten surprises for 2024. View transcript View the video here

A review on industry returns in private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, commercial real estate, infrastructure and private credit View video here

Six questions and answers on the intersection between geopolitics, US politics and financial markets View transcript View video here

Comments on NYC compared to 21 other US cities with respect to urban recovery, commercial real estate, mass transit, crime, outmigration, work-from-home trends, tax rates, economic pulse, fiscal health, unfunded pensions, energy prices, industry diversification and competitiveness. View transcript View video here View deck here

I asked Chat GPT-4 questions on economics, markets, energy and politics that my analysts and I worked on over the last two years. This piece reviews the results, along with the latest achievements and stumbles of generative AI models in the real world, and comments on the changing relationship between innovation, productivity and employment. View transcript View video and charts here

Global resilience to higher rates View transcript View video and charts here

The impact of underperforming 2020 and 2021 US IPOs View transcript with chart references

Comments on mega-cap stocks and artificial intelligence. Then, it’s time for some of my unsolicited letters to Barron’s, MSNBC, “No Labels”, FHFA and more.

Time to retire the US/Emerging Markets barbell for a while View transcript with chart references