Markets

IT’S BEEN AN UNUSUAL week in the bond market, and not necessarily in a good way. This has many investors questioning the value of bonds, which is understandable. Bonds are supposed to be the “safe” side of a portfolio, but they’ve struggled in recent years.
Arguably, the drama we’re seeing in the bond market today began more than 50 years ago. To put today’s situation in perspective, I’ll briefly summarize that long history. Then we can look at what steps you might take to better protect your portfolio from here.

A $5,000 payment for every adult citizen. Talk about feeling jealous from the other side of the pond. So I thought I’d create a thought experiment to make myself feel better.
On a purely personal level, it’s easy to imagine how that cash might be useful. Perhaps to pay down high-interest debt, top up an emergency fund, or buy a low-cost index tracker. But what happens if we step back and think about the economy as a whole?

THE OPEN KITCHEN restaurant has been a fixture in Charlotte, North Carolina for 75 years. The restaurant has an old-time feel, with memorabilia, including menus from years gone by, lining its walls. Those old menus provided David Enna, a financial journalist, with a laboratory for examining the effects of inflation.
What did Enna find? The oldest menu on display is from 1963. To state the obvious, today’s prices make those from the 1960s look quaint.

NOT TOO LONG ago, Treasury Inflation Protected Security (TIPS) was a relatively obscure investment for safe long-term fixed-income investments. For the first twenty years of the new century, consumer prices were mostly stable or rising at a too-slow-to-notice rate. Why bother with anything related to inflation?
Sadly, persistently low inflation made us complacent on the biggest long-term risk of bond investments — the insidious unexpected inflation that robs us of the purchasing power of our “safe” investments.

The national debt just hit $40 trillion and rising. Seems like possible dire consequences for the markets perhaps the economy as more borrowing may raise interest rates.
’What is the general consensus on the risks we may be facing. Time to go into bonds?

WALMART SELLS FOOD. They sell car tires. Board games too. You can stop at any Walmart in the world and buy the same plethora of consumer goods. One roof, dozens of product areas, thousands of individual items.
This “cross-vertical” strategy has many perks to consumers like us. But it’s not without flaws. From brand dilution to in-store clutter, down to a lack of item expertise when you ask questions of employees – there are issues with “selling everything to everyone.”

BY NOW, YOU’VE probably heard the story of the 25-year-old wunderkind Leopold Aschenbrenner. After graduating as valedictorian from Columbia University at age 19, he worked for FTX, the crypto trading firm, then found his way to OpenAI, where he worked as a researcher for about a year, until mid-2024.
In the months after he left OpenAI, Aschenbrenner wrote a 165-page paper titled “Situational Awareness,” in which he detailed his views on the future of artificial intelligence.

AFTER YEARS OF heady gains in the stock market, many investors are facing the same question: To manage risk, they’d like to cut back on one or more of their holdings. But because of the potentially costly tax bill that might result, they aren’t sure exactly how to do that.
How can you square this circle?
One easy option would be to donate appreciated assets to charity. But that would make sense only if it aligns with your charitable goals and,

WHEN IT COMES to financial decisions, many investors subscribe to an approach known as evidence-based investing. The idea, as the name suggests, is to base decisions, whenever possible, on data rather than on intuition or other informal methods.
This sounds logical. It isn’t perfect, though. Economic and financial indicators have weaknesses which are important to be aware of. 
Consider, for example, the Cyclically-Adjusted Price-to-Earnings, or CAPE, ratio, developed by Robert Shiller, a Yale professor and Nobel laureate,

AS WE CELEBRATE 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, I’m reminded of an expression that’s popular in the investment world: “This time is different.”
The phrase dates to a 1993 publication titled “16 Rules for Investment Success,” authored by the veteran investment manager Sir John Templeton. Rule number 11 included the following admonition: “The investor who says, ‘This time is different,’ when in fact it’s virtually a repeat of an earlier situation, has uttered among the four most costly words in the annals of investing.”
Templeton’s message,

For the past seven years, I worked in contemporary art. Four months ago, I left galleries for a financial institution. I expected to discover a world governed by fundamentals rather than stories. Instead, I found different stories being told with greater precision.
Many people classify art as “speculation” while assuming publicly traded securities are “investments.” But numerous financial assets—meme stocks, cryptocurrencies, SPACs, and even highly sought-after private companies like SpaceX—derive a substantial portion of their value from narrative,

THE INVESTMENT WORLD is full of storytellers. And while these folks might be entertaining, they generally aren’t very helpful. There’s one category of stories, however, that I do think is useful: They’re what I might call investment fables. They’re apocryphal stories that likely aren’t real. But they’re helpful nonetheless because each carries a useful lesson. Here are some of the more popular ones.
Consumer choice. In 1999, Richard Mille and a partner launched a company to make wristwatches.

THE WAY INVESTORS think about the stock market may be entirely wrong.
Intuition tells us, and academic research confirms, that a company’s stock price should respond to important news and information. When a company announces a new product, for example, its stock should go up. And when results fall short of expectations, it should decline. 
But a new paper titled “The Inefficient Pricing of News” calls this idea into question. The authors found that investors respond much more slowly and inconsistently to market news than previously thought.

EARLIER THIS SPRING, Emil Verner, an economist at MIT, made an observation: The stock market, he said, seemed to be exhibiting “excess tranquility.” Despite an ongoing war, inflation and other negative headlines, investors seemed surprisingly unfazed. The market was on track for its fourth year in a row of positive returns. Through May, it had gained 11%.
But no sooner did Verner make this observation that the market did begin to wobble. Last Friday,

A few weeks ago my 27-year-old daughter mentioned she’d been hearing a lot about memecoins. That conversation sparked this text, which I wrote for her first and then revised for HD. I hesitated over the slight political connotation, but on reflection the underlying lesson feels too useful not to share.
Do you remember inauguration week? January 2025 didn’t just mark a political transition, it also launched a brand new cryptocurrency: the $MELANIA memecoin. It arrived with fanfare,