2025 Commentaries

Investing naysayers have let gloom override judgment under Donald Trump

Here is a link to a column I penned for the Financial Times. It was just published in the online edition, and it will appear tomorrow in the print edition. It is a synthesis of my last two commentaries on overly emotional markets. Good luck trading. ______________ Upcoming Travel Schedule: Jun 11: Washington, DC Jun […]

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Will every 10bps back up in USTs become a “Liz Truss” moment?

With the markets calming, I have not written in a couple weeks. That said, during the chaos of April and early May, I wrote much more than usual. And in each of those past notes, I tried to counter the relentless negativity from so many clients, competitors, and colleagues. While others were issuing recession forecasts, […]

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Emotional Arbitrage

Towards the end of the 1987 movie classic Wall Street, as BlueStar Airlines stock was collapsing, a calm Bud Fox enters into the following telephone exchange with an emotional Gordon Gekko: Bud: “You once told me don’t get emotional about stock, Gordon. Don’t. The bid is 16 1/2 and going down, and as your broker […]

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Is the TWD a guiding light for Plaza 2.0?

Away from all the “we are in recession now” folks choking on their breakfast sandwiches just after Friday’s strong payroll release, a sleepy currency pair was lurching onto the financial market center stage. The Taiwan dollar, which almost always trades in highly stable fashion against the USD, broke all norms and appreciated over 4% on […]

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April recap: Unchanged in quiet professional trading

Like many folks, I did not expect the opening gambit in tariff negotiations to be so extreme. In retrospect, I suppose Trump’s time-tested “art of the deal” approach should have had us all more prepared for that posterboard back on April 2nd. After all, his style has always been to push towards the edges of […]

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The Myth of Fed Independence

I can’t help but chuckle when I see so many spun-out financial market professionals opine on the cataclysmic risks associated with threats to Fed independence. The idea that “The Creature from Jekyll Island” has somehow not been contaminated by the swamp that surrounds it, is surely one of the most foolish narratives in market folklore. […]

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