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Thinking

Going for Gold… Again

In March of 2023, about eighteen months ago, I wrote a piece in this forum titled “GITA: Gold Is The Alternative” (see here), suggesting that investors should look at gold as an investment for various reasons listed in that piece. At the time, the price of gold was around $1,979 […]

Monetizing Volatility Spikes

This week has been one for the record books…if you are a volatility trading nerd like the three of us, it was also a very active, and sleepless week. As we tell our clients, this is what you pay us for – we stay awake so you can sleep. One […]

How The Carry Trade Crashed The Market, Again, And What Comes Next

Over the last few days, the sudden volatility in the markets has resulted in clients, friends and family (especially my wife) all wondering what just happened, and more important, what happens next. For sure everyone by now has read that one of the culprits was the action by the Bank […]

Making Good in Bad(water) Markets

Two weeks ago I had the distinct pleasure (some may say pain instead of pleasure), of finishing the 135 mile Badwater 135 race, the self-proclaimed “toughest foot-race in the world”, in just under 40 hours. I was supported by an excellent crew that consisted of one elite runner who is […]

David vs. Goliath: Why Small Caps Killed Large Caps As Inflation (Barely) Softened

The big keep getting bigger, until they don’t. Since nothing grows to the moon, in the markets there always comes a time when momentum reverses sharply, and the unloved become loved and the loved become hated. In the dot-com crash, the signs of an impending recession resulted in high flying […]

Is the Stock Market in a Bubble

One of the most heavily discussed topics in the financial media today is the observation that most of the gains in the stock market are being driven by just a handful of names, and this, as in past episodes of market melt-ups and melt-downs, may be a precursory signal for […]

Levered Single Stocks ETFs on NVDA

In a piece I published last week in this forum (here) I mentioned how the availability of explicit leverage to some, but not to all, has frequently resulted in the tendency for all participants to move off an optimal portfolio into increasingly risky securities. My conclusion was that similar to […]

Markowitz Bites Back… Again

In December of 2006, which is almost 17 years ago, I wrote the original version of this short paper titled “Markowitz Bites Back: The Failure of CAPM, Compression of Risky Asset Spreads and Paths Back to Normalcy”. It was influenced by a simple yet elegant publication by Harry Markowitz, the […]

Getting Paid To Hedge Stock Market Risk

Wouldn’t we all like to get something for nothing?  Have our cake and eat it too? Especially when it comes to buying “insurance” on the stock market?  As someone who specializes in the esoteric field of “Tail Risk Hedging”, I am always asked by investors whether there is a cheaper […]

The New Bond King Is… The 2-Year Treasury Note

I had the pleasure of working for over a decade for the greatest bond investor of all time – Bill Gross. Recently, with another Bill — Ackman — publicly going short the bond market and then covering the short and advertising the exploit in a tweet, many market commentators crowned […]


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