Quarterly Client Letter: Q1 2024
Therefore, we are prepared for a very broad range of interest rates, from 2% to 8% or even more, with equally wide-ranging economic outcomes — from strong economic growth with moderate inflation (in this case, higher interest rates would result from higher demand for capital) to a recession with inflation; i.e., stagflation. Jamie Dimon, Chairman…
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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…
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…
Quarterly Client Letter: Q1 2023
“Recent indicators point to modest growth in spending and production. Job gains have picked up in recent months and are running at a robust pace; the unemployment rate has remained low. Inflation remains elevated. The U.S. banking system is sound and resilient. Recent developments are likely to result in tighter credit conditions for households and…
How to Stay Safe During Tax Season
How to Stay Safe During Tax Season April is the time of year when people are gathering tax documents and filing forms with the IRS. Due to the rise in cybercrime, the IRS is reminding all taxpayers about potential scams and how to stay safe online during tax season. For a list of incidents and…
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…
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,…
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…
Quarterly Client Letter: Q4 2022
“The margin of safety is always dependent on the price paid. It will be large at one price, small at some higher price, nonexistent at some still higher price.” It has been said countless times that, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” a quote attributed to Mark Twain. In reality, history occasionally does…
2023 Key Planning Numbers
The following “Key Numbers” document highlights changes to tax reference numbers for 2023. Contribution limits for retirement accounts and HSA accounts have increased for 2023: Furthermore, those individuals who contribute to a Colorado College Invest 529 plan in 2023 can fund an account up to: $20,700 for single filers per beneficiary per year $31,000…
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…
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…
Discounted Cash Woes
Discounted Cash Woes It’s earnings season on Wall Street, an opportunity for investors to peer into the latest financial results of publicly traded companies. When Amazon reported earnings on October 27th, the stock dropped about 20% the following day. Joe Weisenthal at Bloomberg quipped that after looking at their numbers, “back-of-the-envelope math would suggest that…