Posts by Todd Hurlbut - CIO

“There is nothing new in Wall Street. There can’t be because speculation is as old as the hills. Whatever happens in the stock market today has happened before and will happen again.” -Jesse Livermore As a lifelong student of capital markets, there is rarely a dull time, at least not during my career. From the Read More

Commodity prices have been in a long-term downtrend while stocks have soared for much of the past decade. Given that we are twelve years into this bull run in stocks and historically asset class returns have always reverted to the long-term mean, one might ask: is this the time to buy commodities? A major factor Read More

As negative yielding global debt breaks a new record by surpassing $17 trillion, investors have never had more difficult conditions in the pursuit of yield, let alone positive yields on a real basis. In this endless search for yield, investors are being pushed further out on the risk curve of investing in high yield bonds and Read More

One of the most misunderstood aspects of successful investing is the concept of frequency versus magnitude. If you asked someone to invest in a strategy that loses money 65% of the time, they might think you had lost your mind. However, the preceding information tells you nothing about the efficacy of the overall investment strategy. Read More

Investment strategies can be broken down into two broad categories: convergent and divergent. Convergent strategies assume that economies are stable, investors behave rationally and over time asset prices will “converge” with their intrinsic value. Most assets are invested in and benefit from convergent strategies. Divergent strategies, on the other hand, assume that economies are not Read More