Yearly Archives: 2021
Fourth Quarter 2021
The financial writer Morgan Housel wrote a few years ago about two types of investing knowledge. There’s expiring knowledge that comes at us in firehose fashion primarily through the daily “news”. There’s also what Housel terms long-term knowledge that primarily comes through reading books. As we have noted in the past, the dynamism and adaptability within the U.S. economy are significantly underestimated. (One of our first principles of the U.S. economy.) Problems create opportunities to provide solutions. Each day millions of minds are busy thinking of ways to solve today’s problems. Adaptability and dynamism are often what makes life better, making some of the expiring knowledge “expire”...Read more →
Third Quarter 2021
Social distancing, flatten the curve, shelter in place, non-essential workers. These were terms that helped shape the investment world in 2020. A different set of terms is shaping 2021: Help wanted, shortages, on backorder, higher prices.
As the global economy re-opens in herky-jerky fashion from COVID-19 shutdowns, we’re sure it’s not news to you that the supply chains that underlie the production of many goods and the delivery of numerous services are significantly constrained by bottlenecks...Read more →
Second Quarter 2021
A year ago at this time, on the heels of one of the sharpest rebounds for domestic stocks in history, many folks wondered whether the advance was “real” or not. A host of worries dominated headlines including a resurgence of coronavirus cases and social unrest. In fact, the first vaccine’s FDA authorization was still months away, and so too, were the November elections. Fast-forward a year, return the value of the economy to pre-pandemic levels, slap another record advance on the market (S&P 500), and things are no different...Read more →
First Quarter 2021
Strong corporate earnings growth is sometimes very scarce, like diamonds. At other times, it’s like pears or apples during a strong harvest—abundant and easy to find. We heard this above commentary many years ago from a stock analyst. Certainly, seems that the corporate results of 2020 and 2021 will—barring serious setbacks in progress against the pandemic—reflect both extremes of this characterization...Read more →
