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Per capita Soybean inventories at generational lows

June 25, 2014 by Matt McCracken
This morning bean prices are ticking slightly upward on news inventories are depleting. How low are bean inventories? From Bloomberg.com: U.S. soybean reserves on June 1 were probably 382 million bushels, the smallest for that date since 1977,...Read more

FED's Interest rate hike and the USD

March 14, 2014 by Matt McCracken
The popular view is higher interest rates should be supportive of the underlying currency. The idea is simply that a higher yielding currency is more attractive to investors. And given that the USD is the only major currency yielding anything, the...Read more

MONEYBALL - THE MOVIE

February 6, 2014 by Matt McCracken
A CRITICAL LESSON FOR ALL INVESTORS I just saw the movie Moneyball this weekend and I have to say the filmmakers did a better than decent job of telling the remarkable story of Billy Beane and how his unconventional methodologies built a severely...Read more

The CPI Lie

April 8, 2011 by Matt McCracken
PART I: INTRODUCTION There are lies, damn lies and then there are statistics! - Mark Twain - Have you noticed that what you pay at the pump or the check-out counter seems to have little correlation with government inflation figures? Does it seem...Read more

"Act of God" blamed for Bad Unemployment Report

February 4, 2011 by Matt McCracken
This morning I turned on one of the financial media stations to see what was going on in the markets and the big news was the BLS Employment Report which provided some not-so-optimistic figures. A couple analysts on the show were cackling about how...Read more

The Tower of Babel Indicator

July 8, 2009 by Matt McCracken
3 They began saying to each other, “Let’s make bricks and harden them with fire.” (In this region bricks were used instead of stone, and tar was used for mortar.) 4 Then they said, “Come, let’s build a great city for ourselves with a tower that...Read more

Greenspan's "Conundrum"

April 20, 2009 by Matt McCracken
If you watch or read any of the financial media outlets, you've heard of the "Flattening/Inverted Yield Curve". Greenspan has referred to it as a “Conundrum” since long-bond yields have fallen while he repeatedly increases the overnight Federal...Read more

The End (of Wall Street’s Boom) by Michael Lewis

December 9, 2008 by Matt McCracken
Michael Lewis recently wrote an article appearing in Conde Nast’s Portfolio.com titled The End which details the root cause of the credit crisis and the ensuing collapse of Wall Street firms like Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch. It is a must read...Read more

INDEX INVESTING, PART I - THE BASICS

July 8, 2007 by Matt McCracken
Index Investing is a strategy that consists of investing in passively-managed mutual funds and/or ETFs that are designed to mimic a particular index (i.e. S&P 500, NASDAQ 100, Russell 2000). Typically, index fund advisors use one of three fund...Read more

INDEX INVESTING, PART II - ADVANTAGES OF INDEX INVESTING

July 7, 2007 by Matt McCracken
There are a large number of American financial advisors who are deeply committed to the idea that MPT is one of the greatest financial innovations in investing since the creation of the equity markets themselves. I refer to these Index fund advisors...Read more