📈 Record Highs
Michael Milken, Josh Brown, Cliff Asness, David Kelly, Jared Dillian & More
“I only want to be uncorrelated to the stock market when it goes down.”
—Paul Podolsky
Research
GMO - Record Highs…But We’re Still Excited (2 pages)
This brief piece from GMO explains why an abundance of cheap assets and appealing valuation spreads within asset classes presents the best relative asset allocation opportunity they’ve seen in 35 years.
J.P.Morgan - Guide to Retirement 2024 (53 pages)
The 2024 Guide to Retirement has great charts covering social security and Medicare, tax planning, withdrawal rates and more.
Bonus Content
"Remember, even if you don't have a position, you have a position. What do I mean by that? Well, pretend you want to buy GE. But you haven't yet. If GE goes up, and you haven't bought it, you experience pain. You are synthetically short. If you are thinking about shorting something, and you haven't yet, and it goes down, you feel pain. You are synthetically long. You can have mental positions as well as actual positions. Even if you don't have any positions at all, you can experience pain. Ain't trading great! You are never truly flat, because you are always thinking about doing something."
Jared Dillian, The Daily Dirtnap (source)
"Since the early 1990s, about 80% of the U.S. dominance has come from relative price/earnings multiple expansion versus non-U. S. stocks. People were paying less for the U.S. at the beginning, and now they are paying considerably more. Maybe that is justified; maybe things like U.S. tech dominance are real. But justified doesn’t mean repeatable. Justified at best means something isn’t going to reverse in a big way.
Looking to the future, the case that the U.S. will have permanently higher equity returns is pretty untenable. Even if U.S. companies are worth it, they are priced as such."
- Cliff Asness, AQR (source)
"I worry about some things in society—what social media is doing to all of us, which isn’t good. Often at speeches, people ask me for advice, and I say get a pitcher of water and a baseball bat. And if you would kindly drop your cellphone into the pitcher of water and take a baseball bat to your TV, you would feel much better."
- David Kelly, J.P. Morgan Asset Management (source)
Podcasts
Capital Allocators: Michael Milken – Innovations in Finance, Medicine, and Education: Legendary financier Michael Milken talks about his career, philanthropic interests and markets today. The next episode is with Milken’s personal attorney about the years post-Drexel & his pardon in 2020. [2/26/2024 - 7 minutes] Apple | Spotify | YouTube
50 Fires: Another Side of Downtown Josh Brown: In Carl Richards’ new podcast, Josh Brown shares some moments that molded his financial perspective and approach to life. [1/24/2024 - 51 minutes] Apple | Spotify
Planet Money: The billion dollar war behind U.S. rum: The Planet Money podcast investigates the rum war, a tax scheme and Captain Morgan. [3/15/2024 - 23 minutes] Apple | Spotify
What Else Is Happening
Did you miss last week’s email?
Meb Faber read his white paper, “T-Bills and Chill…Most of the Time.”
This is a good one: “I only want to be uncorrelated to the stock market when it goes down.”