Department
Finance.
Investing, markets, and financial thinking.
Lately on the shelf
30 of 1162A Second Look at CAIE: Correcting What I Got Wrong About Calamos’s Strategy
When a consulting client first asked my opinion on the Calamos U.S.
10 Friday AM Reads
My end-of-week morning train WFH reads: • Congrats. You’re About to Unwittingly Make Elon Musk a Trillionaire. SpaceX is IPOing next week. And there’s a good chance you’re gonna own a portion of it—whether you like it or not. (The Bulwark) • Oil industry warns…
Has Gold Lost Its Safe Haven Status?
Gold is trading like a high-beta asset these days and not like a safe haven
Six days to go…
It is Friday, 5 June and only six days to go until the FIFA World Cup starts again.
Revisiting the SpaceX Valuation: A Post-Prospectus Update!
A few weeks ago, I assessed the value of SpaceX ahead of its initial public offering, with the admission that I was making my estimates with drabs of data, some of it coming from unofficial sources. I also promised to revisit my valuation, when the prospectus…
AI Is Growing the Pie — But Not Sharing It Equally
What a Major New Study Tells Investors and Advisors About the Real Economic Impact of AI
At The Money: Grab Your Summer Rental Soon Now!
At The Money: Grab Your Summer Rental Soon!! (June 3, 2026) It’s not too late to get your summer rental! But many of the prime locations have already been snapped up. If you want to get to the lake, beach, or mountains, you’d better hurry! Full transcript belo…
Longform links: suspicious markets
Thursdays are all about longform links on Abnormal Returns. Wherever possible, free links for premium sites are used. You can check out...
On the Inevitability of an AI Bubble
What if AI is NOT a bubble? The post On the Inevitability of an AI Bubble appeared first on A Wealth of Common Sense. ...
10 Thursday AM Reads
My morning Montreal reads: • Shorting SpaceX? Jefferies Becomes Go-To Bank After IPO Miss: It’s the kind of look that ambitious investment bankers usually strive to avoid: When SpaceX named the roughly two dozen firms handling its IPO, Jefferies Financial Grou…
Gold is NOT displacing the Dollar
It's the safe haven status of gold that's gotten dinged recently, not that of the Dollar
Fund managers tell you when they will outperform
Last year, I wrote a post showing that hedge fund managers have an inkling when they are going to underperform, and it can be measured with their SEC Form PF filings.
What Should Japan Do?
An imagined conversation on Japan with my friends Brad Setser and Joe Gagnon
Wednesday links: the returns to being rich
Shining a Light on Private Credit
Building a Benchmark from the Shadows
5 Things I Am Thinking About
I keep hearing comments and concerns about these markets in the media. Since my wife is tired of me yelling at the television (“No! That’s wrong!”) you are the lucky recipients of my ire. Here are five things I have been thinking about regarding markets, the e…
The end of forward guidance - Good, let's use rules
Recent comments from Fed Chairman Warsh suggest that he is not in favor of the current forms of forward guidance. No dot plots, or perhaps not in the current form. The Fed has proven to be a poor forecaster, so the guidance may not be helping the market. It do…
Gold overtakes Treasuries as central bank reserves
From work done by the ECB, gold has now overtaken US Treasuries as the largest reserve asset for central banks. This is driven by the strong price appreciation of gold over the last year, even with the recent declines. US Treasuries have seen yields rise, redu…
Personal finance links: winning at life
Wednesdays are all about personal finance here at Abnormal Returns. You can check out last week’s links including a look at how...
Forming better decisions through known, unclear, and presumed framework
This book, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers is now 40 years old, yet it provides some good, simple insights on how to make better decisions. You may not be interested in the political stories provided, but they provide context on how b…
The current inflation divergence - trimmed mean versus core PCE
The preferred inflation measure for the Fed is core PCE. The idea behind using a core measure is that it filters out extremes that may be driven by supply shocks. Fed Chairman Warsh has a different preferred measure: the trimmed mean, which includes food and e…
Animal Spirits: The Biggest Short Squeeze of All-Time
On today's show we discuss peak FOMO, chip stocks going nuclear, 1990s stock market flashbacks, trillion dollar IPOs, the AI trade is global, the bear case, a tale of two bull markets, bad luck in the real estate industry, South Korea's boom, movies are back a…
10 Wednesday AM Reads
My mid-week morning plane reads: • Real-Estate Agents Are Quitting the Slow Housing Market: Four years into a struggling market, even agents who survived the initial shakeout are hitting their breaking point. Fewer sales, longer timelines, second jobs. (Wall S…
The Latest Oil Price Panic
We're currently in the third big panic over oil prices - it'll end exactly like the first two
Bigger city, lower property yields
Runaway housing costs are such a big issue that even in the notoriously divided US Senate, 89 out of the 100 senators recently voted to pass the most ambitious legislation in decades to bring down housing costs.
The Housing Market Recession
The luck of the draw in your career. The post The Housing Market Recession appeared first on A Wealth of Common Sense. ...
Tuesday links: stretching your brand
Clippings 12 ~ Above target
Stubborn inflation, plunging oil inventories, surging semis, a changed Agg, AI slop, AI in fund selection, and more.
CAIE and Autocallable Structured Note ETFs: A Risk Analysis
I was recently asked my opinion on the Calamos US Equity Autocallable Income ETF (CAIE).