(Au)our Insights

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”  — Rainer Maria Rilke The Quarter in Review That was not fun. We discussed in our prior quarterly commentary that we thought the party had gone on a bit too...Read More

This is the question we are all asking ourselves as the Federal Reserve throws money at Wall Street and the federal government throws money at Main Street. The market’s rise this past week has many hoping it’s a sign that recovery is imminent, and we’ll...Read More

“By suppressing volatility, central banks created a system unable to deal with bad news. Or to put it another way, leverage was built up on the premise that nothing bad happens.” — Andrew Lapthorne Given their swift plunge, the markets appear to many to be...Read More

What is the headline risk? It is somewhat obvious, but the move of COVID-19 outside of China has shown that it has a higher probability of being a pandemic than it did before. The research we have reviewed shows that it is 20 times worse...Read More

“It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.” — G.K. Chesterton The Quarter in Review What a way to end the year! Global markets experienced a robust...Read More

Increasing Fragility “Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty.” -Nissim Nicholas Taleb Well-intentioned plans can bring unintended consequences. The world’s major central banks have been adding stimulus to the...Read More

  “The investor of today does not profit from yesterday’s growth.” —Warren Buffett   The Quarter in Review Compared with previous quarters, the third quarter exhibited considerably more volatility with little appreciation. Most investment markets are showing signs of exhaustion due to continued uncertainty about...Read More

Two weeks ago, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, said, “So, we have taken liquidity out of certain products. And it won’t hurt you very much in good times. Watch out when times get bad and people are getting stressed a little bit.” He...Read More

The Sound of Money Dying Wealth can be created and destroyed. Wealth is created when the investment of time, money, and energy arrives at an endpoint where the profit obtained is greater than the investment made. A simple example: you give your child ten dollars,...Read More

Liquidity—the growing scarcity of it right now—is something that has bothered us for a while. It’s getting harder to turn an asset into cash. Higher liquidity implies the ability to sell quickly at a price similar to recent pricing. One way of thinking about liquidity...Read More