Cullen Roche: Pragmatic Capitalism

Share the post "Some Bad Days"There’s a company near San Diego called “No Bad Days”. Their logo is a palm tree with the saying and I see it all over cars and stuff. I’m sure you can derive the message – living in San Diego or any place tropical can feel like there are no bad days. That’s total bullshit, but it’s a nice mentality to try to maintain.You see, the last few days have been bad days. No, it’s 70 degrees and sunny as I type. I am literally staring at a palm tree. But San Diego is...

Share the post "Goldman Sachs: No Signs of Recession"I’ve spent a lot of time in my career toying with regime change strategies. That is, strategies that operate one way in one regime environment and change in another. So, for instance, if you knew when a recession was going to occur you might downshift your portfolio to something less aggressive. Since recessions are pretty rare and often involve traumatic market environments you can be relatively passive, but still try to manage the risk...

Share the post "Why MMT is Important"Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has been in the news quite a bit in the last few weeks.¹ It’s refreshing to see this considering how bad the state of macroeconomics is. I say this as someone who has been very critical of MMT for many years. I think they overreach on some items, but as a general theory I think they provide a much clearer and more useful picture of the macroeconomy than most mainstream economic schools do. Among the important things they get...

Share the post "Three Things I Think I Think – Bubbles Edition"Here are some things I think I am thinking about:1)      Is there an emerging global housing bubble?  Here’s a nice perspective from UBS on the state of the global housing market. They provide a Global Real Estate Bubble Index that puts the highest risk markets in perspective. Their conclusions – there isn’t widespread sign of a bubble as there was in 2006, but there are pockets and cities that are unusually risky. The top names...

Share the post "Donkey Economics"Here’s a piece in the LA Times by Stefanie Kelton of MMT fame. The piece is titled:Congress can give every American a pony (if it breeds enough ponies)The basic gist of the article is that the US government has a printing press and it can afford to buy whatever quantity of output that it wants. It is not constrained by the quantity of funds that it can obtain, rather, it is constrained by the real resources available to buy.This is nothing new to anyone...

Share the post "Three Things I Think I Think – Video Edition"I spoke at the Stansberry Investment Conference this past Tuesday. Hopefully we’ll get the full presentation out at some point since I covered a lot of useful ground in 30 minutes. Here’s a short interview I did afterwards. We touched on a number of topics including:1) The difficulty of navigating the bond market these days and why actively selecting where you get exposure is wise.2) Thoughts on stock market valuations and why you...

Subscribe to stay up to date with the latest videos ► https://www.sbry.co/YTNeW Stansberry Alliance 2017: NewsWire Interviews Cullen Roche, Founder of Orcam Financial Group Cullen Roche founded Pragmatic Capitalism in 2008 to provide an alternative perspective to finance and economics. As an independent financial analyst and portfolio manager, Cullen brought some unique views to the way we perform financial and economic analysis. His exceptional understanding of the monetary system and...

Subscribe to stay up to date with the latest videos ► https://www.sbry.co/YTNeW Stansberry Alliance 2017: NewsWire Interviews Cullen Roche, Founder of Orcam Financial Group Cullen Roche founded Pragmatic Capitalism in 2008 to provide an alternative perspective to finance and economics. As an independent financial analyst and portfolio manager, Cullen brought some unique views to the way we perform financial and economic analysis. His exceptional understanding of the monetary system and...

Share the post "Value Investing is Dead, Long Live Value Investing!"Here’s a great piece by Wes Gray discussing the viability of value investing. Here’s the money shot showing the relative performance of value investing strategies versus the S&P 500. We’re in the middle of one of the longest droughts on record for the value guys:I’ve made myself pretty clear on factor strategies – they usually sell alpha (market beating hopes) at greater than the cost of beta (a low cost index fund) and...

Share the post "Let’s Throw Some “Keynesian” Bombs"People really like to throw bombs at “Keynesian” economics because it’s become synonymous with big government and unfettered spending. The really common (and incorrect) understanding of Keynesian economics is that people shouldn’t save and should just consume until they are so fat that the economy is at full employment. The other (slightly less incorrect) version is that the government should help these people get as fat as possible by...