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Positioning For The Coming Capitulation

When I scan the market for “distortions”, nowhere is the situation more odd from a historical context than in the level of global yields.  Indeed much has happened that was unforeseen, even unimaginable a few years ago. Many sovereign yield curves (and even corporate bonds in many countries) are negative, […]

The Yin And Yang Of Investment Approaches

(With Frank Jones, San Jose State University) Summer seems to have arrived early in California, and with it warm temperatures and, given our El Nino year this year, lots of tall grass, and….rattlesnakes! As a long-time trail runner, I am prepared for the occasional hazard of the trail (I have […]

Why the Quants Might be Winning on Wall Street

Many of us have seen the question in the accompanying graphic (the technical name of which is the “Müller-Lyer illusion”): Which of the lines is longer? When we look at them, we see that the lines in the middle (“arrow tails”) of each set are longer than the other lines […]

Things Could Get Much Worse For The Banks Before They Get Better

The performance of the banking sector this year has been dismal. Despite the sharp corrective rally of the last week the sector remains one of the worst performers. A number of European banks have already plumbed through the lows seen during the financial crisis. A few others globally look set […]

Normalcy of Deviance

I recently attended a talk by Charlie Precourt, a 2012 inductee of the US Astronaut Hall of Fame, and a pilot on four space shuttle flights. The topic was “Normalcy of Deviance”, a phrase he took from author Diane Vaughn to explain two tragic space shuttle disasters. Normalcy of deviance […]

A Look Back at 2015

A lot happened in 2015. With the surprise devaluation of the Swiss Franc in the early part of the year that sent shock waves through the currency markets, to the Federal reserve raising interest rates for the first time in a very long time, markets were buffeted by events that […]


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