“People think the world is getting worse.. What’s actually happening is our information about what’s wrong in the world is getting better.”
- Ray Kurzweil. Hat-tip to Jeremy McKeown.
Get your Free
financial review
There are limitations to all things.
In Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’, an unnamed man and his son travel through a post-apocalyptic wilderness that was once the United States. At one point they stumble upon an underground bunker. Within it there is a supply of canned food and gold coins. The cans of food have value – real, practical utility. The gold coins.. not so much.
A variation on this theme comes via the author Peter L. Bernstein:
“About one hundred years ago, John Ruskin told the story of a man who boarded a ship carrying his entire wealth in a large bag of gold coins. A terrible storm came up a few days into the voyage and the alarm went off to abandon ship. Strapping the bag around his waist, the man went up on deck, jumped overboard, and promptly sank to the bottom of the sea. Asks Ruskin: ‘Now, as he was sinking, had he the gold? Or had the gold him?’ ”
These are exceptional examples, of course. In just about every possible future you can envisage, short of a disastrous shipwreck or catastrophic nuclear war, gold will have value.
One of the great insights of classical economics is that value is subjective. Value is in the eye of the beholder. The problem we all face as investors is that we inhabit a world in which values, both financial and moral in nature, have been horribly distorted by the actions of politicians, bureaucrats and central bankers. Trying to find cornerstones of lasting value in such a world is like fighting fog.
The asset manager Tony Deden has summarised our predicament well:
“There is no argument in that we live in dismal times. The subprime crisis was merely the prelude of the financial chaos that has ensued. Yet, it is not the consequences of such financial crises that matter as much as the recognition that we are suffering from a deeply rooted moral crisis.”
We live surrounded by fraud of all kinds, and we wallow in ignorance.
“We know nothing of our own history, of money or capital. We see money and credit as the source of wealth. We embrace financial engineering while being uninterested in or ignorant about its economic impact. We embrace the idea of wealth without work and even demand it. We buy other people’s debts and we call them assets. We demand real goods and plentiful credit to pay for them. We look at rising asset prices and reckon them to be wealth. We vote idiots into high office. We hail economic growth, as measured by GDP and by the clipped coins of our times, and hail it as economic progress. We are a society of idiots.”
Tony wrote those words over a decade ago, but it’s difficult to see in what respect things have changed demonstrably for the better in the investment world during the intervening period. Most assets have simply become more expensive.
And now we have an economically if not kinetically bellicose Trump administration 2.0 defiant against the rest of the world, and a variety of western ‘democracies’ beset by a horrible metastasis of virulent Socialism. Faced with the very worst case outcomes, even gold itself, per Cormac McCarthy, is no real solution. As Tony Deden puts it, gold “is not a drug that cures the disease, but merely a symbol of the flight from dishonesty – a symbol of independence, honest money and permanence.”
One of the books in our financial library is a 1998 work by the journalist John Rothchild – ‘The Bear Book: how to survive and profit in ferocious markets’. Ever since we’ve been involved in the management of private client portfolios (since roughly 1998, in other words) we’ve been more interested in protecting the downside than searching for ‘get rich quick’ schemes. This is because we’re convinced that most wealthy people are more concerned with capital preservation in real terms than they are with abstract capital growth. This has been borne out by the more recent research by behavioural psychologists like Kahneman and Tversky, which has tended to show that people are typically loss averse. That is to say, faced with the choice of a potential gain of a certain value or a potential loss of equivalent value, incurring the loss hurts more. Hence a focus on managing downside risks first, and letting growth take care of itself.
‘The Bear Book’ contains a chapter titled ‘The Bear Busters’ which features research from the Minneapolis-based Leuthold Group. Their line-up of nine “defensive sector selections” that performed well during 11 prior market declines includes:
- Soft drinks.
- Pharmaceuticals.
- Food suppliers.
- Major oils.
- Household products.
- Telephones.
- Tobacco.
- Electric utilities.
- Gold.
Bear in mind that the book in question, and therefore effectively the list itself, was published in 1998.
Nevertheless, there are some obvious problems with the composition of these defensive recommendations. Take pharmaceuticals, for example. (Please !) In the aftermath of the Covid crisis, no investor could blithely put capital into Big Pharma without lingering concerns about both basic human morality and more specifically the possibility of removal of the legal liability shield (for ‘vaccines’) in the US.
‘Major oils’ would be another sector with a huge question market next to it. While oil companies “rose in price in one bear market (1983-1984)” and “In five others, they lost much less than the average stock,” one is tempted to respond: So what ? Times change. The rise of alternative energies, madness over the cult of Net Zero, geopolitical stability, and the volatility of the oil price now all weigh heavily on prospects for the oil majors. See the recent fate of BP for more.
‘Telephones’ would be another problematic investment. Their world has completely changed since 1998, to the extent that most of the fixed line carriers have become utilities with declining or non-existent monopoly privileges as the world has gone mobile and online.
To be fair, Rothchild does acknowledge that it’s not a perfect list, and to his credit he also rightly highlights two situations in which such “defensive” investments may well not work out as safety-seeking investors intended. One is “when a crash brings rapid and indiscriminate selling. In the Crash of 1987, five of the nine groups mentioned above were down 20 percent or more, and only the telephones and utilities managed to hold their losses to around 10 percent.” The other, which is of at least equal concern to us today, is “when defensive stocks are overpriced going into a bear [market].”
Which is exactly how we would define most stock markets now – overpriced, not least in terms of supposedly defensive sectors and companies. ‘Defensiveness’ as a characteristic does not exist independently of price. Above a certain price, no company can be regarded as a safe haven. A “margin of safety”, in other words, is a conditional quality; it is not an absolute.
What worries us – in addition to the geopolitical climate – is that stock markets don’t appear to be pricing in anything that could derail them. This could, of course, mean that the current rally has legs. But anybody focused on valuation will be minded to be moving slowly towards the exit, regardless. That’s at least the case in the US, where Robert Shiller’s cyclically adjusted p/e ratio for the S&P 500 index stands at roughly 38 times versus a historical average of 17.
There are clearly alternatives to supposedly defensive stocks. Rothchild titles one of his chapters ‘Cash is trash, but not always’. At present, however, we find it difficult to get excited about being poorly compensated for taking on heightened counterparty, confiscation and inflation risk by way of bank deposits that barely match – understated – inflation.
As our clients and longstanding readers will appreciate, bonds are not a serious option.
Which brings us to gold. Rothchild asks ‘Will gold stop a bear ?’ and gives a guarded ‘Yes’: “Whether bought by the ounce (physical gold) or by the share (mining stocks), gold has gratified its owners in six of the eleven losing streaks for the S&P 500” – the caveat, again, being that this guidance was issued back in 1998, well before the current financial crisis.
Rothchild cites the example of Homestake Mining Group as a proxy for the gold mining sector, and draws on its experience during the Great Crash of 1929 and its aftermath. In the immediate selling panic of Black Monday, 29th October 1929, Homestake stock wasn’t immune, and fell from $11 to $8 along with its peers. But as gold rallied while the rest of the market sank, Homestake rose to $15 a share in 1932. A share in a typical Dow component, General Motors, fell from $45 to $3.75 during the same period.
Homestake then rallied from $15 to $68 by 1937. “Overall, the owners of gold stocks came out four to six times ahead of the game, while owners of every other kind of stock were far from breaking even..”
How relevant is the 1930s experience of gold investors ? During a period of deflation, the price was fixed by government decree at $20.67 an ounce. So gold was spared the experience of other commodities (whether gold deserves the stark label ‘commodity’ is admittedly a moot point), until President Roosevelt unilaterally raised its price to $35 an ounce in 1934.
In the chaotic markets of 1968-1974, mining shares also experienced the rollercoaster, rising and falling with the overall market, but again they didn’t fall as far. At the trough of the market in 1974, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down by 40 percent, mining stocks were up and physical gold closed the year at $186.50 an ounce, up from $132.50, and way ahead of its 1973 low of $66. And then gold went on a tear, ending the decade at $850.
Again, the relevance of the 1970s experience can only be limited; history never quite repeats itself, although there may be the semblance of rhyme.
Our interest in gold (both in bullion form and in mining shares), and more recently silver, again in both forms, derives from a scepticism about the sustainability of the global debt mountain – not simply as an insurance policy against geopolitical chaos, though gold offers some useful attributes here, too. In this respect, we have no formal price target. Rather, we will look to reduce our exposure to gold when the debt problems of the developed world have been largely if not wholly resolved. Suffice to say we have no intention of reducing our precious metals allocation any time soon.
We have long written that for the governments of the developed world, there can only be three ways out of the debt trap.
One is to engineer sufficient economic growth to keep servicing the debt. Good luck with that everywhere.
The second is to default. The not-so-trivial by-product of a wholesale western debt default would be the instantaneous bankruptcy of the banking and pension fund industries.
Which brings us to Option Number 3. Option Number 3 happens to be the choice that every heavily indebted government has made throughout all of recorded history: inflate. Which is precisely what central banks have sought to bring about through Quantitative Easing, so it is one of the world’s biggest ironies that all the trillions deployed in its pursuit have so far come to naught.
But as the financial commentator Grant Williams has said: hasn’t is not the same as won’t. In exactly the same way that just because something hasn’t happened does not mean that it won’t. Then Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke pointed out in July 2005 that there had never been a nationwide fall in US property prices. He implied that because it hadn’t happened, it never could. The irony is that pretty much as he was saying these words, the US national property market was collapsing.
So we’re minded to conclude that even though QE and other monetary shenanigans have failed dismally to trigger the inflation that governments and their client central banks desperately need, not least to inflate away their monstrous debt piles, we haven’t seen the last of them. The beatings, in other words, will continue until morale improves.
But morale is precisely at the heart of the problem. Confidence in currency is about the only thing that gives it legitimacy. Scarcity hardly comes into it. The overwhelming attraction of gold as a monetary substitute is that it simply can’t be printed. It is, in the words of Tony Deden, independent (of any national authority), scarce, and permanent. It is, at one and the same time, nobody’s money and everybody’s money. But it is nobody’s liability.
In his earlier essay in defence of gold, Tony pointed out that the US Federal Reserve was on course to devalue the dollar;
“[Bernanke’s, and now Jay Powell’s] colleagues at the ECB purport to be against such measures. This will not last long for they, too, will resort to coin clipping. They too will fail. Today is Greece and Ireland. Tomorrow is Spain. Next month is Britain, France and a host of others. The following month is China, Japan, America and so forth. It may take years but the whole culture of credit and debt will fail. This is reality. We just do not know how or when.
“In the end, the consequences of monetary folly have not been addressed but only postponed. The errors have not been cleared by merely covered up with money and false accounting. Money printing can buy time but not wealth. All roads lead to default and impoverishment of some sort. The only question that remains is what road will be taken.
“The relevance of gold is not in its price but in its ownership. This is precisely important for those who wish to make a profit from gold by purchasing certificates, ETFs and the like. Participating in a price movement is not the same as owning an asset. Owning a piece of paper and thinking you own gold is no different to a farmer who insists to being in the dairy business by owning cattle futures.”
Having identified the nature of the problem, the next challenge is to assess the duration of its lasting. This, as Tony rightly recognises, is next to impossible.
Market timing is impossible, in our view. For this reason we don’t attempt it. We see far greater utility in maintaining a genuinely diversified array of sensible assets at defensible valuations and sticking to it.
The problem with reacting to extreme crises by selling out of equities entirely and sheltering in cash, for example, is that it leads to a just as fraught problem further down the line: when to get back in ?
In the shocking bear market of 1973 – 1974, for example, the UK stock market lost 73% of its value in less than two years. From a peak of over 700 it fell to well under 200. The index ultimately recovered, of course – but it did so without warning. Those who had got out in time and therefore had the luxury of market timing never had the opportunity to get back in. In 1975 the index rose by 150% – but you needed to already be invested to benefit.
And to reiterate, there’s little reason to feel obligated to act in response to whatever you hear about in the news. (And again, if what you hear on the news distresses you, simply turn it off. It’s not compulsory to engage with a fundamentally corrupted legacy news media.) There’s no reason for action because anyone who’s adopted the principles of sensible and appropriate diversification should be able to ride out the storm.
To paraphrase what we wrote in our last commentary, we may be living in an economic and financial Potemkin World, and a world suffused with dishonesty, but the assets we own are real.
………….
As you may know, we also manage bespoke investment portfolios for private clients internationally. We would be delighted to help you too. Because of the current heightened market volatility we are offering a completely free financial review, with no strings attached, to see if our value-oriented approach might benefit your portfolio – with no obligation at all:
Get your Free
financial review
…………
Tim Price is co-manager of the VT Price Value Portfolio and author of ‘Investing through the Looking Glass: a rational guide to irrational financial markets’. You can access a full archive of these weekly investment commentaries here. You can listen to our regular ‘State of the Markets’ podcasts, with Paul Rodriguez of ThinkTrading.com, here. Email us: info@pricevaluepartners.com.
Price Value Partners manage investment portfolios for private clients. We also manage the VT Price Value Portfolio, an unconstrained global fund investing in Benjamin Graham-style value stocks and also in systematic trend-following funds.
“People think the world is getting worse.. What’s actually happening is our information about what’s wrong in the world is getting better.”
Get your Free
financial review
There are limitations to all things.
In Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’, an unnamed man and his son travel through a post-apocalyptic wilderness that was once the United States. At one point they stumble upon an underground bunker. Within it there is a supply of canned food and gold coins. The cans of food have value – real, practical utility. The gold coins.. not so much.
A variation on this theme comes via the author Peter L. Bernstein:
“About one hundred years ago, John Ruskin told the story of a man who boarded a ship carrying his entire wealth in a large bag of gold coins. A terrible storm came up a few days into the voyage and the alarm went off to abandon ship. Strapping the bag around his waist, the man went up on deck, jumped overboard, and promptly sank to the bottom of the sea. Asks Ruskin: ‘Now, as he was sinking, had he the gold? Or had the gold him?’ ”
These are exceptional examples, of course. In just about every possible future you can envisage, short of a disastrous shipwreck or catastrophic nuclear war, gold will have value.
One of the great insights of classical economics is that value is subjective. Value is in the eye of the beholder. The problem we all face as investors is that we inhabit a world in which values, both financial and moral in nature, have been horribly distorted by the actions of politicians, bureaucrats and central bankers. Trying to find cornerstones of lasting value in such a world is like fighting fog.
The asset manager Tony Deden has summarised our predicament well:
“There is no argument in that we live in dismal times. The subprime crisis was merely the prelude of the financial chaos that has ensued. Yet, it is not the consequences of such financial crises that matter as much as the recognition that we are suffering from a deeply rooted moral crisis.”
We live surrounded by fraud of all kinds, and we wallow in ignorance.
“We know nothing of our own history, of money or capital. We see money and credit as the source of wealth. We embrace financial engineering while being uninterested in or ignorant about its economic impact. We embrace the idea of wealth without work and even demand it. We buy other people’s debts and we call them assets. We demand real goods and plentiful credit to pay for them. We look at rising asset prices and reckon them to be wealth. We vote idiots into high office. We hail economic growth, as measured by GDP and by the clipped coins of our times, and hail it as economic progress. We are a society of idiots.”
Tony wrote those words over a decade ago, but it’s difficult to see in what respect things have changed demonstrably for the better in the investment world during the intervening period. Most assets have simply become more expensive.
And now we have an economically if not kinetically bellicose Trump administration 2.0 defiant against the rest of the world, and a variety of western ‘democracies’ beset by a horrible metastasis of virulent Socialism. Faced with the very worst case outcomes, even gold itself, per Cormac McCarthy, is no real solution. As Tony Deden puts it, gold “is not a drug that cures the disease, but merely a symbol of the flight from dishonesty – a symbol of independence, honest money and permanence.”
One of the books in our financial library is a 1998 work by the journalist John Rothchild – ‘The Bear Book: how to survive and profit in ferocious markets’. Ever since we’ve been involved in the management of private client portfolios (since roughly 1998, in other words) we’ve been more interested in protecting the downside than searching for ‘get rich quick’ schemes. This is because we’re convinced that most wealthy people are more concerned with capital preservation in real terms than they are with abstract capital growth. This has been borne out by the more recent research by behavioural psychologists like Kahneman and Tversky, which has tended to show that people are typically loss averse. That is to say, faced with the choice of a potential gain of a certain value or a potential loss of equivalent value, incurring the loss hurts more. Hence a focus on managing downside risks first, and letting growth take care of itself.
‘The Bear Book’ contains a chapter titled ‘The Bear Busters’ which features research from the Minneapolis-based Leuthold Group. Their line-up of nine “defensive sector selections” that performed well during 11 prior market declines includes:
Bear in mind that the book in question, and therefore effectively the list itself, was published in 1998.
Nevertheless, there are some obvious problems with the composition of these defensive recommendations. Take pharmaceuticals, for example. (Please !) In the aftermath of the Covid crisis, no investor could blithely put capital into Big Pharma without lingering concerns about both basic human morality and more specifically the possibility of removal of the legal liability shield (for ‘vaccines’) in the US.
‘Major oils’ would be another sector with a huge question market next to it. While oil companies “rose in price in one bear market (1983-1984)” and “In five others, they lost much less than the average stock,” one is tempted to respond: So what ? Times change. The rise of alternative energies, madness over the cult of Net Zero, geopolitical stability, and the volatility of the oil price now all weigh heavily on prospects for the oil majors. See the recent fate of BP for more.
‘Telephones’ would be another problematic investment. Their world has completely changed since 1998, to the extent that most of the fixed line carriers have become utilities with declining or non-existent monopoly privileges as the world has gone mobile and online.
To be fair, Rothchild does acknowledge that it’s not a perfect list, and to his credit he also rightly highlights two situations in which such “defensive” investments may well not work out as safety-seeking investors intended. One is “when a crash brings rapid and indiscriminate selling. In the Crash of 1987, five of the nine groups mentioned above were down 20 percent or more, and only the telephones and utilities managed to hold their losses to around 10 percent.” The other, which is of at least equal concern to us today, is “when defensive stocks are overpriced going into a bear [market].”
Which is exactly how we would define most stock markets now – overpriced, not least in terms of supposedly defensive sectors and companies. ‘Defensiveness’ as a characteristic does not exist independently of price. Above a certain price, no company can be regarded as a safe haven. A “margin of safety”, in other words, is a conditional quality; it is not an absolute.
What worries us – in addition to the geopolitical climate – is that stock markets don’t appear to be pricing in anything that could derail them. This could, of course, mean that the current rally has legs. But anybody focused on valuation will be minded to be moving slowly towards the exit, regardless. That’s at least the case in the US, where Robert Shiller’s cyclically adjusted p/e ratio for the S&P 500 index stands at roughly 38 times versus a historical average of 17.
There are clearly alternatives to supposedly defensive stocks. Rothchild titles one of his chapters ‘Cash is trash, but not always’. At present, however, we find it difficult to get excited about being poorly compensated for taking on heightened counterparty, confiscation and inflation risk by way of bank deposits that barely match – understated – inflation.
As our clients and longstanding readers will appreciate, bonds are not a serious option.
Which brings us to gold. Rothchild asks ‘Will gold stop a bear ?’ and gives a guarded ‘Yes’: “Whether bought by the ounce (physical gold) or by the share (mining stocks), gold has gratified its owners in six of the eleven losing streaks for the S&P 500” – the caveat, again, being that this guidance was issued back in 1998, well before the current financial crisis.
Rothchild cites the example of Homestake Mining Group as a proxy for the gold mining sector, and draws on its experience during the Great Crash of 1929 and its aftermath. In the immediate selling panic of Black Monday, 29th October 1929, Homestake stock wasn’t immune, and fell from $11 to $8 along with its peers. But as gold rallied while the rest of the market sank, Homestake rose to $15 a share in 1932. A share in a typical Dow component, General Motors, fell from $45 to $3.75 during the same period.
Homestake then rallied from $15 to $68 by 1937. “Overall, the owners of gold stocks came out four to six times ahead of the game, while owners of every other kind of stock were far from breaking even..”
How relevant is the 1930s experience of gold investors ? During a period of deflation, the price was fixed by government decree at $20.67 an ounce. So gold was spared the experience of other commodities (whether gold deserves the stark label ‘commodity’ is admittedly a moot point), until President Roosevelt unilaterally raised its price to $35 an ounce in 1934.
In the chaotic markets of 1968-1974, mining shares also experienced the rollercoaster, rising and falling with the overall market, but again they didn’t fall as far. At the trough of the market in 1974, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down by 40 percent, mining stocks were up and physical gold closed the year at $186.50 an ounce, up from $132.50, and way ahead of its 1973 low of $66. And then gold went on a tear, ending the decade at $850.
Again, the relevance of the 1970s experience can only be limited; history never quite repeats itself, although there may be the semblance of rhyme.
Our interest in gold (both in bullion form and in mining shares), and more recently silver, again in both forms, derives from a scepticism about the sustainability of the global debt mountain – not simply as an insurance policy against geopolitical chaos, though gold offers some useful attributes here, too. In this respect, we have no formal price target. Rather, we will look to reduce our exposure to gold when the debt problems of the developed world have been largely if not wholly resolved. Suffice to say we have no intention of reducing our precious metals allocation any time soon.
We have long written that for the governments of the developed world, there can only be three ways out of the debt trap.
One is to engineer sufficient economic growth to keep servicing the debt. Good luck with that everywhere.
The second is to default. The not-so-trivial by-product of a wholesale western debt default would be the instantaneous bankruptcy of the banking and pension fund industries.
Which brings us to Option Number 3. Option Number 3 happens to be the choice that every heavily indebted government has made throughout all of recorded history: inflate. Which is precisely what central banks have sought to bring about through Quantitative Easing, so it is one of the world’s biggest ironies that all the trillions deployed in its pursuit have so far come to naught.
But as the financial commentator Grant Williams has said: hasn’t is not the same as won’t. In exactly the same way that just because something hasn’t happened does not mean that it won’t. Then Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke pointed out in July 2005 that there had never been a nationwide fall in US property prices. He implied that because it hadn’t happened, it never could. The irony is that pretty much as he was saying these words, the US national property market was collapsing.
So we’re minded to conclude that even though QE and other monetary shenanigans have failed dismally to trigger the inflation that governments and their client central banks desperately need, not least to inflate away their monstrous debt piles, we haven’t seen the last of them. The beatings, in other words, will continue until morale improves.
But morale is precisely at the heart of the problem. Confidence in currency is about the only thing that gives it legitimacy. Scarcity hardly comes into it. The overwhelming attraction of gold as a monetary substitute is that it simply can’t be printed. It is, in the words of Tony Deden, independent (of any national authority), scarce, and permanent. It is, at one and the same time, nobody’s money and everybody’s money. But it is nobody’s liability.
In his earlier essay in defence of gold, Tony pointed out that the US Federal Reserve was on course to devalue the dollar;
“[Bernanke’s, and now Jay Powell’s] colleagues at the ECB purport to be against such measures. This will not last long for they, too, will resort to coin clipping. They too will fail. Today is Greece and Ireland. Tomorrow is Spain. Next month is Britain, France and a host of others. The following month is China, Japan, America and so forth. It may take years but the whole culture of credit and debt will fail. This is reality. We just do not know how or when.
“In the end, the consequences of monetary folly have not been addressed but only postponed. The errors have not been cleared by merely covered up with money and false accounting. Money printing can buy time but not wealth. All roads lead to default and impoverishment of some sort. The only question that remains is what road will be taken.
“The relevance of gold is not in its price but in its ownership. This is precisely important for those who wish to make a profit from gold by purchasing certificates, ETFs and the like. Participating in a price movement is not the same as owning an asset. Owning a piece of paper and thinking you own gold is no different to a farmer who insists to being in the dairy business by owning cattle futures.”
Having identified the nature of the problem, the next challenge is to assess the duration of its lasting. This, as Tony rightly recognises, is next to impossible.
Market timing is impossible, in our view. For this reason we don’t attempt it. We see far greater utility in maintaining a genuinely diversified array of sensible assets at defensible valuations and sticking to it.
The problem with reacting to extreme crises by selling out of equities entirely and sheltering in cash, for example, is that it leads to a just as fraught problem further down the line: when to get back in ?
In the shocking bear market of 1973 – 1974, for example, the UK stock market lost 73% of its value in less than two years. From a peak of over 700 it fell to well under 200. The index ultimately recovered, of course – but it did so without warning. Those who had got out in time and therefore had the luxury of market timing never had the opportunity to get back in. In 1975 the index rose by 150% – but you needed to already be invested to benefit.
And to reiterate, there’s little reason to feel obligated to act in response to whatever you hear about in the news. (And again, if what you hear on the news distresses you, simply turn it off. It’s not compulsory to engage with a fundamentally corrupted legacy news media.) There’s no reason for action because anyone who’s adopted the principles of sensible and appropriate diversification should be able to ride out the storm.
To paraphrase what we wrote in our last commentary, we may be living in an economic and financial Potemkin World, and a world suffused with dishonesty, but the assets we own are real.
………….
As you may know, we also manage bespoke investment portfolios for private clients internationally. We would be delighted to help you too. Because of the current heightened market volatility we are offering a completely free financial review, with no strings attached, to see if our value-oriented approach might benefit your portfolio – with no obligation at all:
Get your Free
financial review
…………
Tim Price is co-manager of the VT Price Value Portfolio and author of ‘Investing through the Looking Glass: a rational guide to irrational financial markets’. You can access a full archive of these weekly investment commentaries here. You can listen to our regular ‘State of the Markets’ podcasts, with Paul Rodriguez of ThinkTrading.com, here. Email us: info@pricevaluepartners.com.
Price Value Partners manage investment portfolios for private clients. We also manage the VT Price Value Portfolio, an unconstrained global fund investing in Benjamin Graham-style value stocks and also in systematic trend-following funds.
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