[embedded content] Never miss an episode, subscribe here! On a new edition of What Are Your Thoughts?, Michael Batnick and Josh Brown discuss: * The Repo Rate mini-panic * Are we ready for the Daniel Jones Era? * Does it really take $350,000 a year to live in cities? * Standup comics up in arms […]

Scott Minerd (Guggenheim) weighs in on whether or not the “insurance cuts” the Federal Reserve is in the process of executing have any real efficacy historically. He finds that the usage of rate cuts during the late stages of an expansion have a mixed record – sometimes they’ve been able to put off a recession […]

My Chart o’ the Day comes from LPL Research chief strategist John Lynch and it looks at the phenomenon of negative-yielding debt. Lynch notes that “Unfortunately, the global search for yield has now morphed into a scenario in which fixed income investors, or lenders, attempt to ‘potentially lose less’ rather than ‘earn slightly more’ than […]

Larry Swedroe comes around swinging a sledgehammer at absurd claims that index funds are distorting the markets – if this is the case, then, if anything, selecting the mis-priced securities ought to be a field day for investors who believe they can do so. Swedroe offers up the only argument against “passive distortion” that really […]

If you’ve spent the last ten years fussing over all of the economic reports related to heavy industry and commodity costs and other dirty data points, you probably feel like you’ve been running in circles, caught up in a wild goose chase of oscillations and obfuscations that’s brought you no closer to understanding the twists […]

[embedded content] We’ve built the foundation for The Compound YouTube channel over the last year or so and now we’re on the verge of shattering through the 10,000 subscriber mark. We love having this outlet as a place to discuss the investment research we’re doing and to chat with friends of ours and experts we […]

I’m just going through the latest piece from Vanguard about an internal study they’ve carried out among their self-directed investment clients who’ve migrated over to financial advisors. It turns out that these investors were significantly more likely to shed the “home country bias” within their equity allocation, to have a higher allocation toward equity risk […]

Learning how to live, work and serve from one of the industry’s biggest success stories. Really thankful to Joe Duran for coming out and sharing his story and his ideas about the future with us all. [embedded content] More at The Compound (YouTube)

My pal Peter Boockvar on the absurdity of ECB’s continued slash and burn march into negative interest rate territory, with no signs of efficacy in sight… *** If Mario Draghi was a private sector CEO who kept relying on strategies that failed to achieve ones objective, he would have been fired years ago but because […]

Irrational Exuberance by Professor Robert J. Shiller is on my top ten book list for investors. It’s one of the most powerful explainers for how emotion drives investment decisions ever written. Shiller shared the Nobel Prize for economics based on the body of work he’s assembled based on this topic. His new one comes out […]

Wanted to get this up quickly, will have more to talk about once I come up for air. We landed at JFK at 4:30am today, anytime taking a redeye sounds like it’s a good idea to you, take a moment and then smash the bones in your hand with a hammer, because you need to […]

Monster day on tap today after a very successful opening night at Wealth/Stack. The big buzzword so far seems to be CX or Client Experience. It transcends basic considerations like customer service and asset management and technological edge – it’s basically the culmination of all these things and how they work together as a whole. […]

[embedded content] Josh here – Our friend Jamie Catherwood of O’Shaughnessy Asset Management came by The Compound to speak with Michael and I about the ancient relationship between financial advisors and FinTech. Advisors have been operating for thousands of years – Jamie unearthed some cuneiform tablets depicting the first attempt at modeling the income from […]

Michael and I back with another fresh episode of What Are Your Thoughts. You can play along by commenting on any of these topics here – we love your ideas and feedback! [embedded content] Follow The Compound on YouTube and be the first to get our new stuff. 

I did Stephanie Ruhle’s program on MSNBC this morning. You watch the segment below: Tell me what you think here!

My pal JC Parets has taught me a lot about technical analysis over the years and I always read his stuff when it comes out. You can get his email blasts too by signing up at AllStarCharts.com. Anyway, here’s his read of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, with a monthly zoom-out… Let’s start with Papa […]

Michael Burry joins the chorus of people referring to indexing and passive investing as a bubble. It’s not his main point – which is that value small caps are being ignored, which is true – but it’s a point we now hear tossed off on a daily basis as casually and nonchalantly as though the […]

I spoke with George Svegara and Ryan Donovan for Orion’s new podcast, The Fuse Show. My firm was built backwards from the way virtually every other RIA in the country was built – we began onboarding clients in Texas, California and Washington State before we really built up much of a local presence near our […]

I did a hit for Kai Ryssdal’s excellent Marketplace Radio show about how the markets are (and aren’t) reacting to tweets and headlines about the trade war. Hope you like it! Listen here: Or read the transcript: What’s really happening when markets react to trade war news (Marketplace)

Stop acting like you’re not gonna pay for Disney+ app this winter. You’re gonna pay. Everybody pays. [embedded content] Bonus, here’s the new Rise of Skywalker stuff they teased at a fan convention over the weekend… [embedded content] And in case you were wondering how aggressive the Mouse is going to be about wrenching market […]

This tweet blew up… I am. 42 years old. At 7% average annual return I’ll live to see Dow 100,000. I buy dips, reinvest dividends and ridicule economists. https://t.co/xixJcyNcrj — Downtown Josh Brown (@ReformedBroker) August 26, 2019 I have a big SEP IRA contribution to make this October  I can’t touch that money again for […]

Should you trade on tariff headlines? Simple decision tree: Are you running algorithms with keywords in them specifically dedicated toward reacting profitably to the release of news, rumors, lies and other innuendo related to the current trade / tariff / currency war between China and the United States? Then yes, you should. If the above […]

My wife and kids have never seen Chicago and it’s one of my favorite cities in America and they have another week before school starts so off we go! I’m really excited to share my favorite sights and neighborhoods and restaurants and tourist attractions with the babies. They got to see Boston for the first […]

Check this out. [embedded content] Josh here – just a quick announcement from me and my friend Anthony Stich of NaviPlan about what we’re about to unleash in Scottsdale, AZ next month for the first annual Wealth/Stack Conference. Tony is an expert in throwing monster parties at wealth management events and this time he’s pulling […]

“cut the shit.”  Yesterday I tweeted about how difficult it is for an incumbent President to win reelection with an economic slowdown happening in the back half of their first term. It’s basically impossible, regardless of party or whatever else might be going on. There have been 19 incumbent Presidents since 1900 who have sought […]

Donald Trump was forced to learn a new term this week – “inverted yield curve” – and he is not surrounded by any actual experts who can help him understand what he needs to do. [embedded content]

I’ll make this very simple – if you have decades of saving and investing ahead of you, the best thing that could happen is a stock market that goes nowhere over the next ten years, allowing you to automatically buy dips in your 401(k) and accumulate your portfolio at prices that are not record highs. […]

[embedded content] Read this too: Yield Curve Inversions Aren’t Great For Stocks (A Wealth Of Common Sense)

Everyone is reading this new Joachim Fels piece at PIMCO today about the fact that there are now $15 trillion worth of negative-yielding sovereign bonds around the world, something that just a few years ago would have seemed wholly inconceivable based on what we thought we understood about human nature, risk, the mechanics of the […]

Back in May the guys on @CNBC @HalftimeReport kinda snickered at the idea of #Bitcoin being a #SafeHaven investment… It appears that they who laugh last, laugh best… 😂🚀💪🏼 pic.twitter.com/c7jA3QMmzb — Mark W. Yusko (@MarkYusko) August 6, 2019 I’m not mad at Mark Yusko because I’ve been in the financial media game for 9 years […]

If you’re a normal person reading this, it is likely your diversified retirement portfolio’s nominal value declined by somewhere between 2 and 4 percent today. Maybe you didn’t bother logging in to the 401(k) provider’s website. Maybe your advisor’s login gateway is too annoying to deal with so you just haven’t bothered to check. But […]

A friendly reminder – long-term investing is similar to being the pilot for a commercial airline: Lots of calmness and regularity punctuated by the occasional “OH MY F***ING GOD!” moment. And in those moments, both successful long-term investors and pilots will remind themselves of what the procedures are and how they are supposed to react […]

$BYND #SHAM #MOCKERY #SHAMEFUL $GS #SEC –#INSIDERS pic.twitter.com/s3JIu2sCKL — JAY T (@STOCKMASTER2000) July 30, 2019 I’m feeling this dude so hard. He is everybody’s uncle who has ever lost money in a trade even when they knew they were right and the world was crazy. The early morning sweat tells you he walked out of […]

A couple of years ago I read this amazing book about the guy who actually killed Jimmy Hoffa. He may have also been involved in running the mob guns to Dallas in the plot to take out JFK as punishment for his RFK’s savage prosecutions just after organized crime figures helped the Kennedys win the […]

I’m extremely grateful to have been named to the Investopedia 100 this year, and to be right behind Michael Kitces, on the same top ten billing as Ron Carson, Sophia Bera and so many other fine practitioners whom I admire and learn from. This is really a thrill. My profile is here. You can check […]

[embedded content] Be sure to subscribe to our channel so you never miss an update Josh Brown here – Michael Batnick and I return with an all new What Are Your Thoughts! Today’s topics: * What technologies that we use now that will soon be obsolete? * Why bother worrying about manufacturing data when consumer […]

Everyone will be watching the Jay Powell show today, not much else going on, so I checked in on some stats for the Wealth/Stack Conference I thought I would share. First things first, the event is now bursting at the seams. My partners at Inside ETFs who are managing the event tell me we’re at […]

One of the things that’s kept people out of stocks (or more lightly allocated) has been the concern over “negative earnings growth” or the idea that the EPS and sales growth of 2018 was petering out. When you hear stuff like this, it’s important to remember that we had a one-time tax cut benefit in […]

I’ve been somewhat off the grid lately, having spent most of this week auditioning potential hires for a very important role here at the firm (more on that in the days to come) plus our annual summer partners’ offsite. But I wanted to pop in just to let you know that our “secret weapon” Bill […]

This week, the Warren Campaign put out its plan to “rein in Wall Street” – their words not mine – including some hyper-specific proposals to completely blow up the private equity business model and offer access to plain vanilla banking services directly from the Federal government. Elizabeth Warren is a much more dangerous candidate for […]

People ask me all the time about how I invest my personal money. I don’t think I’ve ever written about this before, in more than ten years of blogging! Very simply put, I’m a mixture of active and passive, a mixture of mutual funds, individual securities and ETFs, a mixture of public and private assets. […]

ARE YOU IN #FINTECH? https://t.co/vuDa7UYXFV pic.twitter.com/nwVO1DTbPV — Downtown Josh Brown (@ReformedBroker) July 16, 2019 Josh here –  I want to personally invite any and all venture-backed startups in wealthtech to pitch our audience, do demos and appear on stage at Stack Stadium this September. Your potential customers are all there! Here’s Matt Middleton, the conference organizer:  […]

[embedded content] Liftoff is the easiest way to begin investing, there is no minimum and transferring in existing accounts is a snap.   Once upon a time, quality financial advice was only available for millionaires and the sophisticated investors who had the expertise to find the right advisors and understand exactly what they were getting. Non-millionaires […]

[embedded content] FAQ: What are the seven deadly sins of investing? Many of the questions we get from investors revolve around one of these seven mistakes that, if left unchecked, could doom a long-term investing portfolio or retirement plan. Lust!Gluttony!Envy!Pride!Wrath!Greed!Sloth! Michael Batnick, Ben Carlson and Downtown Josh Brown weigh in on each of these sins […]

Sometimes economic data trends, and trends in the same direction for a long time. And sometimes it peaks (or bottoms) and begins trending in a new direction – up or down. But turning points in long-term trends are rare, and there are still other times during which there is no trend at all. And it […]

Having conversations about the stock market this summer, with all the BBQs and days off, etc. One of the things that strikes me these days is how completely unaware civilians are about how old and…non-utilitarian their information is. Many of these talks go something like this… *** So, Facebook is in some trouble, huh? Yes, […]

I almost can’t believe how strong the speaker’s list at this September’s Wealth/Stack is at this point. I mean, I can believe it, because we’ve been killing ourselves behind the scenes to put the agenda together, but still – taking a step back and looking at who’s coming out, it’s pretty exciting. This event is […]

1-click play or subscribe on your favorite podcast app Subscribe to the mini podcast on iTunes or Spotify Enable our Alexa skill here – “Alexa, play the Compound show!” Talk to us about your portfolio or financial plan here Obviously nothing on this channel should be considered as personalized financial advice just for you or […]

You know Hancock and Washington and Franklin and Jefferson. You might even know Greene and Knox, Henry and Hale. And we know you know Hamilton, pretty tough to escape that one these days! But it is very unlikely that you know the name Haym Solomon. This is unfortunate, because he’s the guy who arranged financing […]

[embedded content] This was a lot of fun – we had our friend Allison Schrager up at the Compound to talk about the Nobel Prize for Economics that was shared by Professors Robert Shiller and Eugene Fama for their lifetime contributions. The two men drastically disagree about what drives asset prices, with Shiller believing that […]