A monthly, deep dive, and rigorous piece identifying:
Extraordinary Value Spreads, Mispriced Quality, and Behavioral Errors

The Cash Crucible & the Acceleration of Financial Repression - “Cash is a Legitimate Asset Class for the First Time in Decades, Investors are piling into products that shield them from losses in a rising rate environment.” So said a recent article in Bloomberg. Any headline-hailing investors “piling” into anything should trigger instant paranoia.

KCR’s systematic, evidence-based analytical and investment process is driven by the historical record. Our financial faith resides in what the data shows. Human beings have made the same mistakes in slightly different forms again and again for centuries. Stick to a low-cost, tax efficient process and winning is inevitable.

A Tight Labor Market Returns the Upper Hand to American Workers - The always wonderful John Authers put out a recent piece on inflation. Discussing comments out of the UK, he observed, “I cannot remember a central bank of a large, industrialized country being this negative about its own economy.”

In 1999, Warren Buffett gave a rare explanation of why he felt the stock market would generate poor returns for investors over the long haul. He used simple arithmetic to show that elevated valuations and profit margins made equities vulnerable. The piece was 9 pages, over 4,000 words long, and had a single exhibit.

Protecting & Growing Wealth in the Age of Uncertainty - From 2017 - 2020, speculative trading on predatory apps like Robinhood became a true stock market mania. The catastrophic misallocation of capital was, briefly, a very profitable endeavor. We did not flinch.

Starting in May of 2020, KCR’s research team wrote nearly a dozen pieces making the case for oil. On September 8th, we published Oil Company Stocks to Buy, which summarized our work up to that point and pounded the table for investing in oil stocks. With oil trading below $70, we led out by explaining that oil and natural gas commodity prices did not need to rise to turn oil and gas stocks into powerhouses for investors.

This piece is designed to add color to our Bear Traders post, which showed the five largest market declines since the 1960s. That piece explained the brutal path to getting back to break-even across the history of bear markets using the S&P 500.