Jobless claims “are still very low by historical standards. We expect that to change soon. The WARN numbers, capturing advance notice of plant closures and mass layoffs, have jumped recently and point to initial claims rising significantly over the next few months ..”
“Inflation is probably the most predictable of the regime frameworks, in terms of the magnitude of returns and the persistence of direction. If you are only allowed to use one economic datapoint to guide your decisions, US headline CPI should be it.“
Equity bull markets are 80% of history. Don’t forget the simple lessons…
Man group’s team tries to study whether investment regimes exist and whether one can profit from them.
Interesting analysis on staying competitive in semiconductor manufacturing.
“The dotted black lines toward the bottom show the estimated cost of building a leading edge fab (the lower line) and a line showing double that number (the upper line). Our thesis is that companies whose annual revenue fall between those two lines are at risk of falling off the Moore’s Law treadmill.“
TSMC came close once. Samsung looks close now (though this doesn’t include the rest of the group subsidising the fab). It also shows that Intel’s plans to offer fab services need to succeed.
“Senior secured bonds have always been a constituent of the high yield market. However, over the past few years, their share of the overall index has increased dramatically and is now at a record level of the market. While the coupon structure is different, senior secured bonds are “secured” by the assets of the borrower, much like leveraged loans. This recent development — the growth of senior secured bonds as an overall percentage of the high yield market — blurs the lines between these markets and may lead to increasingly similar behavior between the markets.”
“Over the past 30 years, battery costs have fallen by a dramatic 99 percent; meanwhile, the density [a key measure of quality] of top-tier cells has risen fivefold.”
The UK is the only major region where the number of liquid companies (defined as having more than $1m of average daily traded value over six months) is down since 2003.
Nice post about why aggregates businesses are so good.
“What makes a rock pit valuable is that nobody else can compete with it. The nearest rival owner from two towns over isn’t going to haul his rock into your territory because the trucking bills would eat up all his profit. No matter how good the rocks are in Chicago, no Chicago rock-pit owner can ever invade your territory in Brooklyn or Detroit. Due to the weight of the rocks, aggregates are an exclusive franchise. You don’t have to pay a dozen lawyers to protect it.” -Peter Lynch in One Up On Wall Street, 1989
