Few people bothered to see Trouble with the Curve, a recent baseball movie starring Clint Eastwood and Amy Adams, and most critics didn’t like it. I did see the movie, and without giving away the plot, it is fair to say that the film is a cry against quantitative analysis in sports. Eastwood plays an…
The Federal Reserve spoke yesterday, and not surprisingly decided to buy more treasury bonds to keep expanding the balance sheet. It might have been a bit surprising that they have now also explicitly targeted an improvement in the unemployment rate (6.5%) and stated a tolerable inflation band (2.5%) for investors to use as guides for…
When I look at nonfarm payrolls, I try to disregard the headline figure and look at the year-over-year percent change in unadjusted total payrolls. This allows me to remove any seasonal effects from the series without making any of the hard assumptions required by “fancier” seasonal adjustment methodologies. The November report that came out Friday…
It is commonplace in the business news community to talk about ‘Golden Crosses’ and ‘Death Crosses’. If you’re unfamiliar with these terms, they refer to moving averages (MA) crossing each other. More specifically they describe the movement of a security’s short term MA moving above the long term MA (Golden Cross) and the short term…
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded. Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed. Everybody knows that the war is over. Everybody knows the good guys lost. Everybody knows the fight was fixed. The poor stay poor, the rich get rich. That’s how it goes, Everybody knows. Leonard Cohen, “Everybody Knows”
October 31rst marked the ten-year anniversary of Pinnacle’s Global Investment Performance Standards (GIPS) compliant track record. That’s a big deal in the institutional investment community — it means that we’ve met the GIPS standard for reporting performance (often required by institutional investors). It also means that we have a legitimate ten-year track record, which is…
The 2012 election is over, and Americans find themselves in an unsure financial environment. The country is heading toward a “fiscal cliff” — a series of significant tax increases and automatic spending cuts that will be triggered at the end of the year. Congress and the President are negotiating a compromise solution to prevent that,…
Markets are volatile and in corrective mode, and investors are nervous. Are we witnessing the start of a cyclical bear market, or is this just another correction within a bull market and an opportunity to add risk assets to our portfolios? These are the questions the Pinnacle Investment Team is wrestling with right now, and…
“Is poker more a game of skill or of chance?”
The 2012 election is over and we now know who our president will be for the next four years. We’ve received questions from clients asking what we think the market is likely to do in light of the election. While we don’t pretend to be political pundits, it appears that the balance of power in…
