Author Archives: Michael Murphy

New World Investor – 1.8.26

08
Jan 26
Dear New World Investor: This is our year-end performance review. Overall, we had a great year, up 52.9%, thanks primarily to three factors: ** Our precious metals holdings were up 160.6% ** The Dominators were up 45.8%, including 135.0% on Palantir (PLTR), and 125.3% on Micron (MU) in less than 10 months. Only two of the Magnificent 7, Google and Nvidia, beat the S&P 500 last year. ** The biotechs didn’t go down Click for larger graphic Obviously, in spite of tariff turmoil, the Fed, a government shutdown, increasing unemployment, and consumer confidence in the toilet, it was a bull...

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New World Investor – 12.24.25

24
Dec 25
Dear New World Investor: Right now, it’s jobs, jobs, jobs and inflation, inflation, inflation. Jobs: US nonfarm payrolls rose by 64,000 in November. That wasn’t much, but it was higher than the 45,000 jobs Wall Street expected, and up from October’s sharp decline of 105,000 jobs, It was probably just a blip up in the clear downtrend in job growth from its 2022 post-Covid high of 900,000. The unemployment rate unexpectedly ticked higher to 4.6%, its highest level since 2021, and up by 1.2 percentage points from its trough 30 months ago. Since 1950, this has never happened without the...

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New World Investor – 12.11.25

11
Dec 25
Dear New World Investor: Surprise! – not. The Fed cut the funds rate another 25 basis points (bps, or ¼ of 1%), bringing it down to 3.50%–3.75% after a relatively calm inflation report and relatively weak employment reports. It was their third cut this year and 1.75% in total since late 2024. Two Fed presidents voted to hold rates steady while President Trump’s appointment, Stephen Miran, wanted to cut rates by a half percentage point. That was the first time since 2019 that three Fed officials voted against a policy action. The dot plot forecast is for only one cut...

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New World Investor – 11.26.25

26
Nov 25
Dear New World Investor: The headline September payrolls report claimed the US added 119,000 jobs in September. That’s (A) more than double the consensus estimate for +50,000; (B) more than 5x August’s originally reported +22,000; (C) a positive number following August’s -26,000 revision to minus 4,000; and (D) probably wrong. WARN-act notices of impending layoffs across the 21 states tracked by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland spiked to 39,000 in October. We have only seen a greater number of warnings in 2008, 2009, 2020 – all years marked by severe economic downturns – and May 2025. Click for larger...

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New World Investor – 11.13.25

13
Nov 25
Dear New World Investor: According to Bloomberg, the Fed is stopping their Quantitative Tightening in December and beginning Quantitative Easing, apparently because they are worried about the labor market. They described it as a technical maneuver and Chairman Powell cautioned that “…at a certain point, you’ll want reserves to start gradually growing to keep up with the size of the banking system and the size of the economy. So we’ll be adding reserves at a certain point…” “At a certain point” means sometime in the future. (Bloomberg thinks that could be as early as next summer – or later.) In...

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New World Investor – 10.30.25

31
Oct 25
Dear New World Investor: The shutdown-delayed September Consumer Price Index rose 3% year over year, up a tenth from 2.9% in August but slightly below consensus expectations for a 3.1% increase. It was the highest reading since May, but much of the gain was in food, gasoline, and energy. So the core CPI rose 3% year over year in September, down a tenth from 3.1% in August and below expectations. On a monthly basis, core prices increased 0.2%, below August’s 0.3% gain, which was the strongest monthly rise in six months. In general, tariffs are still pushing up goods prices...

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Flash Alert – Akebia (AKBA) – 10.29.25

29
Oct 25
Akebia Therapeutics (AKBA) announced this morning that in their Type C meeting with the FDA, they learned that the Agency would require “a significantly larger number of patients than proposed, and accordingly would require meaningfully more time and cost to complete.” Therefore, they are not going to pursue a broad non-dialysis chronic kidney disease (NDD-CKD) label for Vafseo. But: “We were encouraged by the discussion with FDA on smaller subgroups of CKD patients where we may be able to align on a potential clinical trial design and path forward.” Given CEO John Butler’s history of winning against the FDA, I...

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New World Investor – 10.16.25

16
Oct 25
Dear New World Investor: We’ve made a lot of money by being early to the AI boom, and there may be many months or even years to go. But I have two big problems with the current speculation. First, you have to realize that the current Large Language Models (LLMs) are an amazing advance, but they aren’t intelligent and they don’t think. They do store more data than any human could, and then use it to predict the next word in a sentence way faster than any human could. That’s a great application of current semiconductor technology, but the only...

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New World Investor – 10.2.25

02
Oct 25
Dear New World Investor: Richard Russell wrote his Dow Theory Forecasts until he died at 91 years old. I’ve always planned to write New World Investor longer, but I realized last week it may be as an every-other-week or even monthly letter instead of the grueling weekly schedule I’ve been on for the last 15 years. What happened was this. As many of you know, my wife and I finally are starting the natural burial ground she has been planning for 10 years. My job is mostly to deal with lawyers, licensing, accounting, and keeping track of burials in compliance...

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New World Investor – 9.18.25

18
Sep 25
Dear New World Investor: First up, I am overwhelmed with our move and starting our natural burial cemetery, so without many events for the next two weeks and the Fed done, I am going to schedule another two-week interval for New World Investor. The next issue will be on October 2, with September payrolls due the next day. Of course, I will send a Flash Alert for any hot news – if Micron wiffs, Amgen finally bids for Akebia (don’t sell right away), etc. Yesterday, the Fed cut the expected 25bps (basis point, or ¼ of one percentage point) and...

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