Can’t resist sharing the following quote from an interview I’m listening to this evening with Grant Williams, the author of the widely read Things That Make You Go Hmmm, and relating it to our messaging herein, as well as to the work we do for clients:
“There’s been a tendency over the past 30-40 years, as media has exploded, to outsource your critical thinking. And that’s what people have done. You don’t get news anymore, you get opinion, everything is opinion. So when people are taking in material, it’s generally opinion disguised as news, so they read it as fact.”
Please consider the above as you take in your financial “news”, whatever the source, each day…
Now, for sure, you get my opinion a lot herein. But, as you’ve noticed, I’ve resorted to nearly the extreme of late to share with you the data underneath my thinking. Even to point of nowadays sharing many of my internal notes, either in their entirety or via excerpts. My objective of course is to educate you, but it’s also to show you the utter lack of bias underneath my/our firm’s assertions.
We have zero interest whatsoever in being bulls or bears at anytime when it comes to markets; our objective is to keep our heads around the probabilities in terms of the next big move, and to manage the risks accordingly.
Long-time readers and clients will attest to our lack of attachment to the bull or to the bear side — as we were raging bulls from the bottom of the last bear market all the way to late last summer when our assessment in terms of probabilities flipped from positive to negative. I.e., as, on balance, bull market conditions no longer existed…
So, while the markets do their thing — as the stock market, for example, responds to news of stimulus that sends it soaring, or to earnings announcements that send it reeling — know that the moves reflected in the trade confirmations you clients receive, as well as the messaging herein, whether you view it as bullish or bearish, reflects a painstaking and exceedingly deep dive into the data day in and day out that we believe best reflect real, global, macro conditions…