Author Archives: Michael Murphy

Dear New World Investor: Earnings season is underway. There are always high-profile misses – looking at you, Netflix – but the key is that overall estimates keep on being revised up. Since the beginning of this earnings season, March quarter S&P 500 earnings have been revised up 2.1% to...

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Dear New World Investor: March quarter earnings reports so far are pretty good, with the notable exception of Netflix. Our stocks start reporting next week with the big guys – Apple, Corning, Gilead, and Meta – going first, as usual. May 9 is the major Russian holiday marking their...

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Dear New World Investor: The headline March Consumer Price Index hit a 40-year high of +8.5%, yet yields fell on Treasury paper because the core CPI excluding food and energy was up “only” 0.3% from February, compared to the 0.5% expected. The core numbers will slow quickly and the...

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Dear New World Investor: Soon to be Fed Vice Chairman Lael Brainard kneecapped the rally by saying the Fed will run down their balance sheet aggressively, perhaps at $95 billion every month, beginning as soon as next month. The 10-year Treasury note closed today with a 2.652% yield while...

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Dear New World Investor: Yield curve inversions, where shorter-dated Treasury notes yield more than longer-dated notes or bonds, are both feared and poorly understood by investors. In the past, whenever the yield on the 2-year note has risen above the yield on the 10-year note, there’s been a recession...

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Dear New World Investor: It’s Spring Break for my eighth-grader, so we headed to the Oregon coast for a few days, hoping the Cascadia tsunami would hold off until we got back. It did, and we came back to the same old, same old: the Fed is more hawkish,...

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Dear New World Investor: Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Or as best you can, with headlines like: Yuan Jumps After Report on Saudis Weighing Its Use in Oil Deals (Whoops, there goes reserve currency status for the dollar) U.S. consumer sentiment near 11-year low; near-term inflation worries mount (Whoops, there...

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Dear New World Investor: Uranium Russian President Putin signed a decree on Tuesday restricting the import and export of specified goods and raw materials “to ensure the security of the Russian Federation.” It did not specify which goods and materials would be restricted, but it may include enriched uranium....

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Dear New World Investor: The Fog of War has descended on the stock market, with no one really sure how blocking Russian banks from the SWIFT international bank settlements system, the Nord Stream 2 bankruptcy (if it even happened) possibly slashing natural gas supplies to Europe, $110 oil, and...

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Dear New World Investor: I was wrong. Putin did invade Ukraine – sort of. He recognized two provinces as countries and then launched a very precise attack on Ukraine’s military installations and airfields. He always plays 3D chess, so he must have something up his sleeve. Perhaps it’s that...

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