Se encuentra usted aquí
Blogs y opiniones de economia en ingles
A vital characteristic of successful investors: Grit
Let’s admit it, the financial industry pays investment professionals quite well and this is one reason why so many young people are attracted to the profession. It isn’t necessarily a passion for markets and investments and more the ability to make lots of money. Especially in bull markets these two things can very quickly become mixed up in the mind of young professionals. But in a bull market, it is easy to make money. It is only when things go wrong that you start to see who is really passionate and who is just trying to make money.
And you don’t need to wait until a bear market comes along to see who is passionate about markets. So many things can and do go wrong in investing that on an individual basis, things can go wrong for you but not others all the time. 2013 was my annus horribilis because I was long gold and short equities in a year when gold prices collapsed by 25% and the S&P 500 was up 25% over the same time. Not a good feeling, but by far not the only time I was wrong, just the most prominent one.
During such periods of disappointment, it is key to stay engaged and work on your performance, but this is when so many people who aren’t in it with their heart and soul tend to mentally check out or give up. And I don’t blame them. I had to learn to remain engaged myself over many years and even in 2013 when I had more than 10 years of professional experience as an investor, I got the occasional feeling of hopelessness. I had to force myself to change my approach to investing and learn from my mistakes. This learning process is hard. It takes something that not many people have: grit. Grit, or the ability to work hard and long towards a goal is a vital ingredient if you want to be a successful investor.
In my case, the hard work was to admit my mistakes and learn how to change my investment process to not make the same mistake again. 2013 was the year when I started to take stop losses and momentum seriously because one thing that cost me a lot of performance was that I clung to my investment positions for too long despite the market going against me. Temperamentally, I was never inclined to follow simple momentum strategies. I was trained as a value investor and am a natural contrarian. Momentum investing or the use of stop losses are both antithetical to these investment approaches. It took a lot of hard work and frustration to change my investment process to include momentum and stop losses into it, but it eventually paid out. My performance has become much better since then.
But had I not been passionate about markets I might not have put up the hard work, but just stuck to my old ways. The next time I was sitting on a losing investment, I might not have cut my losses but let them run and this may have cost me dearly once again. And this is what grit does for you. It helps you not make the same mistake again and again but instead forces you to learn to cut your losses and move on.
Interestingly, this can be shown in lab experiments as William Bazley and his colleagues have done. They recruited a group of volunteers and split them into two groups. Half of all participants were randomly selected and asked to recall an instance in their life when they had to work hard to achieve something that they could be proud of. After this recall of a situation where they showed grit, they were asked to perform a few typical lab experiments to determine their disposition effect, i.e. their tendency to sell winners too soon and hold on to losing investments for too long. After the investment tasks were all done, they were asked to rate their personal grittiness to check if they were still in a mindset that was influenced by a notion of hard work.
Meanwhile, the other half of the participants did no exercise in recalling past episodes of grit but engaged right away in the investment tasks.
The result was interesting. Comparing the people who were primed to think about grit and hard work did not hold on to their winning investments longer than people who weren’t primed to do so. But thinking about grit led to investors realising their losses faster and more frequently. Because they were primed to think about hard work, they were more likely to overcome the painful feeling of having to admit to themselves that they have been wrong. The result: In the lab experiment, the investors who were primed to think about grit ended up with 7% higher wealth at the end of the experiment than the control group.
In other words, grit made them better investors by keeping them engaged in the face of adversity and avoiding bigger losses than necessary.
Propensity to sell winners and losers when primed about grit
a.image2.image-link.image2-652-1378 { padding-bottom: 47.314949201741655%; padding-bottom: min(47.314949201741655%, 652px); width: 100%; height: 0; } a.image2.image-link.image2-652-1378 img { max-width: 1378px; max-height: 652px; }Source: Bazley et al. (2021)
A Denialist Paradise
False optimism is the new religion. Today's Kool-Aid dispensing cult leaders of denial are its false prophets...
As far as doom porn it doesn't get any better than this summer from climate change hell. It's a denialist paradise. The same people who have decided they are more intelligent than the entire healthcare profession are likewise ignoring the worst wildfires and droughts in history while partying like it's 1929 in the summer of COVID liberation.
Things are so bad on the environment I am not sure whether to continue blaming the hairless monkey or blame God for creating such a miscreant species. I'm on the fence right now. Until I see this Roman Circus explode in every direction, my faith will be tested.
From the center view I take exception with both the left and the right for their own uniquely selfish view of this bastardized economy. Help wanted signs abound in blue states and red states alike, giving lie to the alt-right view that Biden's unemployment program - now defunct in all red states is at the center of this unemployment disaster. There are many reasons that the underpaid and overworked hospitality sector is now struggling to meet the needs of a country on vacation, not the least of which is the fact that foreign workers still have not been able to return to this country. It's a year without Mexicans and come to find out the problem isn't that they are "taking all the jobs", the problem is that they aren't taking ANY jobs. And that is a recipe for disaster for the true believers in this system of mass exploitation. Why? Because $15 per hour which was once viewed as a generous minimum wage for foreign born immigrants is now looking like the poverty-inducing stipend it represents to the U.S.-born population. Certainly in no way enough to entice the millions off the sidelines from their newfound COVID-induced "retirement".
It gets worse, because now the work-from-home liberals are using this Delta variant as an excuse to NEVER return to the office, as company after company now moves back their planned office re-opening. Stay tuned for future events because CNN will ratchet up the COVID pandemonium to meet the needs of their pampered work from home audience who require validation for their self-serving virus hysteria.
I have to come down on the side of commonsense on this matter of perpetual hysteria. Would this continuing "crisis" really exist if the economic impacts were falling upon all parts of society equally? If the 401k monetary hyper bubble millionaires counting their riches from home were equally impacted by this ongoing saga, would they be so willing to throw the economy under the bus? Of course not. They love the virtual economy.
Which is why all signs point back to the Grand Casino, because until it explodes, no one will be on the same page. And instead we will have this denialist paradise which is now human history's biggest global Ponzi scheme. And linked to it is a massively leveraged way of life that has the carbon footprint of an extinction level event.
Which gets us back to markets. Last week, lost amid all of the FOMC hoopla, all of the economic data came in weaker than expected. Which is why this week bond yields are beginning to roll over again:
Picture this chart in a global RISK OFF scenario:
Banks are carving out the same top as last year, pre-pandemic:
Last week's new S&P high was attended by a miniscule number of NYSE new highs:
There were two Hindenburg Omens on the Nasdaq in the past six trading days (Fri. June 23rd, and Mon. June 26th). Here we see Nasdaq breadth is three wave corrective:
In summary, this is an extinction level event for true believers in bullshit.
Episode #336: Startup Series – Hugh Thomas, Ugly Drinks, “This Is The Result Of Two 23-Year Olds In A Pub In London Having A Couple Of Beers”
Episode #336: Startup Series – Hugh Thomas, Ugly Drinks, “This Is The Result Of Two 23-Year Olds In A Pub In London Having A Couple Of Beers” Guest: Hugh Thomas is the co-founder and CEO of Ugly Drinks. Use code UGLYMEB for 20% off your order. Date […]
The post Episode #336: Startup Series – Hugh Thomas, Ugly Drinks, “This Is The Result Of Two 23-Year Olds In A Pub In London Having A Couple Of Beers” appeared first on Meb Faber Research - Stock Market and Investing Blog.
Allianz share price drop explained
We saw an 8% Allianz share price drop today, should you be worried? In this article I'll briefly explain what happened and share my thoughts with you.
The post Allianz share price drop explained appeared first on European Dividend Growth Investor.
Shopify Continues Upward Trend As Institution and Hedge Funds Add To Holdings
Shopify, Inc. (SHOP) saw positive growth over the past fifteen months and significantly outperformed the S&P 500, rising by approximately 283.6% as of July 30, 2021, compared to the S&P’s gain of about 36.8%. Shopify achieved a rank of thirteen on the WhaleWisdom Heatmap as of March 31, 2021, up from its previous rank of twenty-one.
Shopify is a global company specializing in commerce infrastructure, providing an e-commerce platform and tools for online stores and retail point-of-sale (POS) systems. Shopify earns subscription fees through customers using its SHOP platform to set up a store online and market and sell their products. Shopify’s merchant customers may also sell in physical locations by using the Shopify POS application.
While the company briefly saw growth slow in early 2020 due to worldwide pandemic-related shutdowns, the business quickly rebounded. Consumers’ habits shifted heavily towards online shopping during the peak of the coronavirus pandemic. That momentum remained even after government restrictions lessened and physical retail space reopened. Convenience and newly established routines are likely reasons why many consumers have not returned to pre-pandemic shopping habits.
Hedge Funds Remain Bullish
Hedge funds have been bullish on the stock, and institutions are also buying. The aggregate 13F shares held by hedge funds increased to about 26.7 million from 22.8 million in the first quarter, a change of approximately 17.1%. Of the hedge funds, 45 created new positions, 103 added to an existing holding, 30 exited, and 81 reduced their stakes. Overall, institutions were buying and increased their aggregate holdings by about 3.0% to approximately 73.9 million from 71.7 million.
Positive Multi-year Figures
Analysts expect to see earnings rise modestly in 2021 and 2022 to an estimated $6.52 per share and $6.59 per share, respectively. Revenue estimates are encouraging, increasing to approximately $4.6 billion predicted for December 2021 and $6.2 billion for December 2022. The 13F metrics between 2015 and 2021 demonstrate that Shopify’s investment potential remains on an upward trend.
Strong Financial Results
Shopify realized second-quarter solid results, with subscription solutions revenue up 70% year-over-year to approximately $334.2 million. Consumers are still spending, and Shopify reported that they built on the momentum by making significant updates to their platform infrastructure, growing their portfolio, and expanding strategic partnerships. The company saw an increase in merchants joining its platform. Existing merchants could also extract more significant benefits from Shopify’s e-commerce platform and tools.
Positive Outlook
Overall, there is a positive outlook for ongoing demand for Shopify’s commerce services. Shopify benefited from pandemic lockdowns and consumer shifts to online shopping and continues to see increased demand and more robust digital commerce trends than in pre-pandemic days. Shopify’s impressive 2021 earnings to date and future revenue estimates should be appealing factors for investors.
Animal Spirits: Investing in Wine
The post Animal Spirits: Investing in Wine appeared first on The Irrelevant Investor.
Climate is non-linear and that may be a problem
In November, COP26 will be the highlight of the year in terms of climate policy. The goal is to commit to further reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to reduce the harmful effects of climate change. In the first half of this year, we have already seen several nations (most prominently the US) commit to more ambitious reduction targets.
And throughout this year, investors who cared to pay attention could hardly take a break between all the announcements of companies committing to becoming net-zero by 2030, 2050, or any other year. This is good news, but the problem may lie in the three letters ‘n’, ‘e’, and ‘t’. Implicit in these net-zero goals is that one tonne of greenhouse gas emissions removed from the atmosphere counts as much as one tonne of greenhouse gas emissions released. In other words, the underlying assumption is that the climate is a linear function of the amount of greenhouse gases contained in it.
This linearity may hold on the margin when we are talking about one person driving his or her car and emitting a couple of tons of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. But on a global scale, we are emitting thousands of tonnes every year and at that scale, it is unknown, if the reaction of the climate to greenhouse gas emissions is still linear.
In fact, a new article in Nature Climate Change hints that this might be a major flaw in our climate targets and in the actions taken to mitigate climate change. Using a climate model of medium complexity, the researchers looked at the reaction to shocks of different sizes and the long-term change in CO2 levels. It turned out that adding 100Gt of CO2 to the atmosphere has a bigger effect than removing 100Gt of CO2. The net effect is roughly 3% for a 100Gt shock but increases to 18% for a 500Gt shock. The chart below shows the difference in long-term CO2 concentrations for a 200Gt addition and a 200Gt reduction in CO2 as well as the net effect between the two which is slightly positive.
Effect of 200Gt shocks of CO2 to the atmosphere
a.image2.image-link.image2-722-1024 { padding-bottom: 70.5078125%; padding-bottom: min(70.5078125%, 722px); width: 100%; height: 0; } a.image2.image-link.image2-722-1024 img { max-width: 1024px; max-height: 722px; }Source: Zickfeld et al. (2021)
I know, every forecast is only as good as the model used to make it and these are model forecasts, but there might be good reasons for this asymmetric response. For example, we know that with higher CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, trees and other plants grow faster and thus remove more CO2 from the atmosphere. But this CO2 fertilisation effect is nonlinear and declines for higher CO2 concentrations. If you have ever dealt with plants you know that fertilising them will help them grow, but above a certain level, more fertiliser just doesn’t give you any added benefits and if you increase the dosage even more, you might kill the plant. The same is true for CO2.
Also, the oceans are able to store enormous amounts of excess CO2 from the atmosphere. But this ability to absorb CO2 declines as the earth’s temperature and CO2 concentration rise.
In summary, once we hit certain thresholds, we move beyond the famous tipping points and then need to extract even more CO2 from the atmosphere to reverse climate change than if we had never emitted this CO2 in the first place.
As I said, so far all we have are model predictions, but if they are correct (and even the most rudimentary climate models from the 1980s have been able to predict CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere to a precision of 1% to 2% as we now know) then we might need to aim for even more ambitious goals than becoming net zero in 2050.
[video] Big Oil is back? A comparison of the 5 oil majors
Hi there! I just wanted to let you know that I published a new episode of Sunday with eDGI ☕ It’s been a…
The post [video] Big Oil is back? A comparison of the 5 oil majors appeared first on European Dividend Growth Investor.
These Are the Goods
The post These Are the Goods appeared first on The Irrelevant Investor.
This Week in Women
The post This Week in Women appeared first on The Belle Curve.
Democratizing Fraud
This society faced two choices - get smarter and fix the mistakes of the past. Or get dumber and double down on the mistakes of the past. We know which path was taken. This society has conflated perpetual decline for exceptionalism...
Traveling the country this long hot summer, one can't help but face the reality that so much of today's false optimism is predicated upon false advertising. A buffoonish sense of over-confidence that now pervades all aspects of society. Those who do not reject this lethal modern Potemkin lifestyle will be destroyed by it sooner rather than later. One way or another.
Consider the fact that the leading companies in this virtual economy make most of their money propagating disinformation. Their hyper lucrative business model is false advertising. Yes I am referring to Facebook and Google. Amazon's main line of business is bypassing the U.S. economy. Likewise, all of Apple's products are now made in China. And Microsoft presides over a software monopoly. Meanwhile, the real economy stocks trade in a wide trading range, going nowhere. The Potemkin stock market mirrors the Potemkin economy and society. None of which would have any inflated value were it not for continuous monetary bailouts.
Consider the fact that stock buybacks will drive the majority of S&P per earnings "growth" this year as companies buy back record stock at record valuations. They are creating an illusion of profit growth solely by shrinking their outstanding share count. Most companies will further impair their bloated balance sheets to do so. These major corporations are now call options on the longest debt/leverage cycle in U.S. history. They are aided and abetted by record leveraged speculators bidding up the stocks of record leveraged companies.
Here we see corporate debt, annual $ change. The optimists would have us believe this pandemic-driven debt binge will not overshoot like last time.
Therefore, it's very fitting that this society just launched the IPO of a company that bilks Millennial investors out of their life savings in the name of "democratizing finance". Literally nothing could be further from the truth. Robinhood is a Candy Crush front-end to the largest HFT dark pool on the planet - Citadel. Is it the top? We will find out. As I showed on Twitter, the Coinbase IPO was the exact top for the Crypto Ponzi market. It also happened to be the day that Bernie Madoff died.
Robinhood is the only major retail stock broker that allows their clients to buy crypto currencies directly. I think we see where I'm going with this - massively leveraged Millennials are now the (weak) link between stocks and Bitcoins.
Moving on to the big Casino, here we see the Nasdaq (100) broadening top. Another Hindenburg Omen on the Nasdaq as we can see from the jump in new lows earlier this week (lower pane):
The biggest and most ignored story of the week was the obliteration of Chinese and Hong Kong stocks. Deja vu of July 2015 the PBOC stepped in to stem the decline of mainland markets. Back in '15 they finally halted the decline at -60% after several weeks of failed attempts.
However, Hong Kong market aficionados will be quick to point out the HK authorities don't intervene in their free markets. So there is no limit to how much they can crash.
Stay tuned to find out.
The story that did make headlines on Friday was the very rare Amazon revenue miss. Here we see the last time Amazon/Tech imploded was last summer post Fed Jackson Hole meeting.
Which is interesting, because that's where I was this week:
Letters to the editor
What We're Reading
Historically, it has been cheaper to buy a used vehicle over a new one, and overall that remains the case. But for some used models—mostly those with low mileage and bought in the past year or two—the differential is closing quickly.
For instance, the average price paid by a customer in June for a one-year-old vehicle was only about $80 less than the selling price of a brand-new vehicle, according to J.D. Power. That gap is typically closer to $5,000 or more, the firm’s data show.
“It just seems like we’re in fantasyland,” said New England auto dealer Abel Toll.
Our population increased from 75 million to 130 million between 1900 and 1940. In some countries comparable increases have been accompanied by famine. In this country the increase has been accompanied by more abundant food supply, better living, more leisure, longer life, and better health. This is, largely, the product of three factors - the free play of initiative of a vigorous people under democracy, the heritage of great national wealth, and the advance of science and its application.
Why for instance should I be called “Professor Cowen,” but few people would address the person fixing their toilet as “Plumber Jones”?
For a long time I have insisted that my graduate students call me “Tyler.” My goal has been to encourage them to think of themselves as peer researchers who might someday prove me wrong, rather than viewing me as an authority figure who is handing down truth.
2013: bid projected $7.4 billion of costs
2019: official budget of $14.6 billion
2020: budget revised to $15.4 billion
2021: government auditors project total spending will be $28 billion.
Debt:
Banks say their wealthy clients are borrowing more than ever before, often using loans backed by their portfolios of stocks and bonds. Morgan Stanley wealth-management clients have $68.1 billion worth of securities-based and other nonmortgage loans outstanding, more than double five years earlier. Bank of America said it has $62.4 billion in securities-based loans, dwarfing its book of home-equity lines of credit.
Have a good weekend.
Episode #335: Startup Series – Thomas Eiden, Atomic Alchemy, “There Is A Vast Shortage Of Man Made Radioactive Materials”
Episode #335: Startup Series – Thomas Eiden, Atomic Alchemy, “There Is A Vast Shortage Of Man Made Radioactive Materials” Guest: Thomas Eiden is the founder and CEO of Atomic Alchemy, a company dedicated to producing radioisotopes used in nuclear medicine. Date Recorded: 7/7/2021 | Run-Time: 1:01:13 Summary: In today’s episode, we’re going nuclear! […]
The post Episode #335: Startup Series – Thomas Eiden, Atomic Alchemy, “There Is A Vast Shortage Of Man Made Radioactive Materials” appeared first on Meb Faber Research - Stock Market and Investing Blog.
Investing Insights: Why You Should Know These Popular Target-Date Fund Providers
Enclothed cognition or: Casual Friday can be bad for you
One of the things that still irritate me is the concept of casual Friday. First, it is very much an American invention. I grew up in Germany and lived for 21 years in Switzerland, two societies that are more formal than the UK or the US. Even worse, for most of my career, I worked in wealth management, which is more formal than investment banking and brokerage.
Today, I have ditched the tie on most days even though it still irritates me to meet clients wearing a suit but no tie. But what I really will never ever comply with is casual Friday. It will be a cold day in hell before I show up in the office on a Friday wearing jeans and a shirt. And one reason for that is simply that my job involves a lot of analytical and abstract analysis and that gets worse if you wear casual clothing.
Wait what? I hear you say. Yes, there is an effect called enclothed cognition first described by Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky in 2012. They asked a couple of students to perform an attention test. The trick about the test was that sometimes they had to perform the test in casual clothing, sometimes in a lab coat that was described to them as a doctor’s coat, and sometimes in a lab coat that was described to them as a painter’s coat. We all associate doctors with increased conscientiousness and greater attention to detail, so making people wear a lab coat described as a doctor’s coat forced them to take on the role of a doctor. As a result, the students that wore a doctor’s coat were better at the attention test and made fewer mistakes than students that were dressed casually. They literally paid more attention to the attention test because the clothes they wore made them act more conscientious. By the way, just putting a lab coat into the room without making the students wear it did not increase performance, and making students wear the lab coat but telling them it was a painter’s coat didn’t improve performance either. People had to be put into the position of a doctor by wearing what they believed to be a doctor’s coat to act differently.
Lab coats are one thing but wearing a suit or other formal clothing may be a different thing altogether, but that is not true. A different set of experiments showed that students who wore clothes that they ‘would wear at a job interview’ performed better at analytical tasks and abstract association tasks. Formal clothing puts you into a different mindset that is more professional and associated with different behaviour. And this leads to different behaviour in practice. Because I am a research analyst and professional investor, my job is full of data analysis tasks and abstract reasoning and these are exactly the tasks that get easier if you wear formal clothing. On the other hand, casual clothing is typically perceived as more relaxed and approachable, so if you have a job in sales a more casual outfit may be more advantageous for you because it reduces the social distance between you and your customer.
But I for one, will stick to formal clothing, and not wearing a tie is about as much of a compromise I will ever make in the office. And I can do that because I can compensate for the lack of formality of going tie-less by wearing more formal clothing that isn’t typically noticed by other people as more formal.
a.image2.image-link.image2-1052-938 { padding-bottom: 112.15351812366738%; padding-bottom: min(112.15351812366738%, 1052px); width: 100%; height: 0; } a.image2.image-link.image2-1052-938 img { max-width: 938px; max-height: 1052px; }Cyber risks affect every company
Cyber-attacks and cyber warfare have increasingly made the headlines this year. When I wrote my book on geopolitics for investors in 2019, I included a chapter on cyber warfare as a major threat for this decade that investors weren’t paying enough attention to. I didn’t expect to be proven right quite that fast.
A new paper by Hélène Rey from the London Business School and her colleagues does two interesting things. Using text analysis, they go through earnings calls of companies around the world to analyse the discussion of cyber risks. And they use the trends in these discussions to try to predict how likely it is that a company will be the target of a cyber-attack in the future. Their methodology shows a weak ability to be able to predict future cyber-attacks, so I would say it is a good start but nothing ready for prime time, yet.
However, what is interesting to see is how cyber risks have spread and grown over the last few years. First, from 2010 to 2015, cyber risks were mostly targeted at US companies and there mostly at companies with high levels of intellectual property like IT companies or companies with lots of customer data. But by 2020 companies in all major countries have become targets of cyber-attacks and cyber risks have become relevant everywhere. Even companies in India and Brazil are now popular targets of cybercriminals.
Intensity of cyber risk by country 2020
a.image2.image-link.image2-507-1378 { padding-bottom: 36.79245283018868%; padding-bottom: min(36.79245283018868%, 507px); width: 100%; height: 0; } a.image2.image-link.image2-507-1378 img { max-width: 1378px; max-height: 507px; }Source: Jamilov et al. (2021)
The other interesting observation is how frequent discussions of cyber risks have become on company earnings calls. In 2013, less than 2% of earnings calls discussed cyber risks. By the end of 2020, that had increased to almost 5%. And if that sounds low, then remember that companies usually only discuss cyber risks for one of two reasons on their earnings calls. Either, they have been attacked or they have made major investments in IT to protect against these attacks. And if one in twenty earnings calls discusses these topics today, it means that the costs of cyber attacks (either to prevent them or the losses from them) have become a major factor.
Share of earnings calls that discuss cyber risks (%)
a.image2.image-link.image2-1012-1456 { padding-bottom: 69.5054945054945%; padding-bottom: min(69.5054945054945%, 1012px); width: 100%; height: 0; } a.image2.image-link.image2-1012-1456 img { max-width: 1456px; max-height: 1012px; }Source: Jamilov et al. (2021)
BASF Earnings Results – Why I added some shares
BASF Earnings Results looked good. Check my article to read my opinion and why I bought some additional shares as a dividend growth investor.
The post BASF Earnings Results – Why I added some shares appeared first on European Dividend Growth Investor.
Episode #334: Peter Johnson, Jump Capital, “What I Think About Most Of The Time Is What Crypto Is Going To Mean To The World”
Episode #334: Peter Johnson, Jump Capital, “What I Think About Most Of The Time Is What Crypto Is Going To Mean To The World“ Guest: Peter Johnson joined Jump Capital in 2013 as its first employee, and leads Jump’s investments in the FinTech, InsurTech, and Crypto / Blockchain […]
The post Episode #334: Peter Johnson, Jump Capital, “What I Think About Most Of The Time Is What Crypto Is Going To Mean To The World” appeared first on Meb Faber Research - Stock Market and Investing Blog.