The last few months have been painful for investors with a range of equity indices crossing the emotive, but entirely arbitrary threshold that demarcates a “bear market”. At the same time, the narrative around the fundamental outlook has changed. Bearish views have proliferated and commentators espousing them received more airtime.… Read the article
Month: February 2016
The economics of language: David Hume, Bitcoin & valuing Facebook
This is an edited version of a post that appeared on Eric’s own Sample of One blog.
David Hume is the first great thinker to identify language, law and money as ‘spontaneous’ institutions of social organisation. They are spontaneous in that they can emerge organically and become widely… Read the article
Are markets telling us something? Making sense of recent price action
‘When markets move a lot there must be a reason why.’ Most of the time this mind-set works well for us: there is an earnings announcement, policy decision, or macro data release, and markets appear to respond (sometimes) in the way you would expect.
Other price moves are not so… Read the article
Could stable oil mean a rapid change in market views on inflation and rates?
With US growth fine and inflation picking up, the market is remarkably sanguine about future interest rate moves. In our view, inflation is highly unlikely to present a problem for policymakers in the short or medium term, but the basis on which market beliefs have been changed over recent weeks… Read the article
Errors in the pricing of equity risk
At M&G’s Annual Investment Forum last week, Eric Lonergan of the Episode team discussed what he sees as the two big questions affecting investment today. Namely, ‘Why do equity markets appear to offer such high compensation for risk?’ and ‘Are we about to enter recession?’ Here is a video… Read the article