Johnny Russell, CFA

You Only Have to Get Rich Once

You Only Have to Get Rich Once Charlie Munger recently appeared on the Acquired Podcast. Needless to say, we are fans of Munger and recommend listening to the full interview. The interviewers asked Charlie what advice he would give to young people today. Charlie was, unsurprisingly, quite modest in his response. He spent considerable time…

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Keep It Simple

Keep It Simple “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.” -Groucho Marx I was at a dinner this summer with other portfolio managers from wealth management firms in the Denver area to talk about markets and investing. When we were asked if we invest in private markets on behalf…

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Rolling with the Punches

Rolling with the Punches The Federal Reserve has raised the effective Fed Funds rate over the past 18 months from 0% to 5.33%. The 10-year US Treasury Yield just hit a 15-year high around 4.30%. Mortgage rates are back above 7%. Source: YCharts via Peak Asset Management   If we had known that this is…

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Fool Me Twice: The U.S. Housing Market

Fool Me Twice: The U.S. Housing Market As markets internalized the risks of COVID-19 in March 2020, stock prices for home construction companies crashed (proxied here with ITB, the iShares U.S. Home Construction ETF). A precipitous drop in economic activity is historically bearish for home builders; perhaps in understandable fashion, investors rushed to sell their…

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Stock Review: VF Corporation

Stock Review: VF Corporation      We’ve written in the past about our mindset of buying businesses as a way to ground and guide our investment philosophy. In that spirit, we’ve recently added a new business – VF Corporation (VFC) – to our model portfolio. VF Corp is an apparel company that owns outdoor and…

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A Classic Bank Run

A Classic Bank Run By now you’ve likely seen the headlines or done some deeper digging into the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). As of Sunday, March 12th the Federal Reserve (Fed), in coordination with the US Treasury and Federal Depository Insurance Corporation (FDIC), has implemented a new program to provide liquidity to…

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Is the Bear Market Over?

Is the Bear Market Over? The better question might be – did the bull market ever end? When you pull back and look at long-term averages for stock market indices like the S&P 500, the pullback in 2022 looks fairly benign. The 200-week simple moving average (SMA) is still pointing up and to the right,…

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Why We Own Stocks

Why We Own Stocks “Because profits go up 8% a year, and stocks will follow. That’s all there is to it.” -Peter Lynch   The latest tug of war in the financial punditry is between the “recession camp” and the “soft-landing camp”. In the recession camp we have consumers and corporations lowering their plans to…

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Not-So-Boring Bonds

Not-So-Boring Bonds At the top of 2022, we wrote that stock market multiples were precariously perched after soaring well above historical averages. Since then, multiples have pulled back to more benign averages: Source: J.P. Morgan Asset Management, Guide to the Markets, 12/15/2022 We had also noted that after a relatively calm year in the S&P…

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Would You Buy All of the Bitcoin in the World for $25?

The recent debacle at FTX and the broader selloff in cryptocurrencies over the past year have us thinking a lot about our investment discipline and why we believe in owning productive assets. What makes for a good investment strategy? In our view, the simple answer is to buy productive assets. No doubt there are a…

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