Category Archive

Investors still hold more than $3.6 trillion of their assets in money-market funds, equal to about 30 percent of the total market capitalization of U.S. companies, according to data compiled by the Washington-based Investment Company Institute and Bloomberg. That’s double the percentage when the S&P 500 reached its all-time high in October 2007, the data show.
::Bloomberg

…but…

There’s always a real risk that a rally is going to be tested. Investors are thinking that giving up some upside to hedge the downside is a very reasonable investment profile.
—Stephen Wood, chief market strategist for North America at Russell Investments, $151.8 billion in assets under management as of June 30

This downturn has changed the way marketers think about spending, if not forever, then at least for a very long while. Clients are not going back to the way they spent.
—Andy Donchin

If scatter prices go to a premium, we have no problem taking our money elsewhere. Look at all the options we have.
—Rob Master, Unilever’s director of media for North America

::via WSJ

Tynt
Attributor

When you have these rapid increases, almost without correction, you will definitely have a correction at some point, so we can expect a lot of volatility….[Investors will be] selling to take up new stocks, that will impact the prices…It may not be all at once, you may not see a decrease of 20 percent suddenly, it could be 10 percent here, and a rise of 5 percent then another 10 percent, you’ll see this kind of volatility in the markets.
—Mark Mobius

I’d like newspapers to pay us too, while we’re at it.
—Nick Denton on the appropriation by the Washington Post of the Erin Andrews story from Deadspin

To describe her as a minor figure in the history of philosophical thinking about knowledge and reality would be a wild overstatement. She’s irrelevant…She doesn’t understand the historical positions of thinkers on these issues, such as Hume and Kant. Even the minority of philosophers with some sympathy for her celebration of the virtues of selfishness usually find her general philosophical system embarrassing.

—Brian Leiter, Director of the Center for Law, Philosophy and Human Values at the University of Chicago

It’s the scrutiny. There is a reputation cost for being wrong. Buy-side research is not that kind of competition. It’s different kinds of clients.
—Partha Mohanram, Columbia

The findings raise questions about why investment firms continue to fund buy-side research and do not simply rely on the sell-side. Our evidence on the stock performance of buy-side recommendations is less surprising than the remarkably strong performance of the sell-side.
—Harvard Business School professors Boris Groysberg, Paul Healy, Devin Shanthikumar and George Serafeim, and Yang Gui from the University of North Carolina

The sell-side analysts know the individual companies better than the buy-side analysts or the money managers. When I talk to them, I get useful information.
—Jerome Dodson, who oversees $2.2 billion at Parnassus Investments in San Francisco

Commodities in Short Supply
Hand Sanitizers is the only commodity reported in short supply.
—ISM June 2009

the good news is also the bad news. The economy is hitting bottom, but it’s a long, uphill climb to get out.
—Alan Blinder, 23 July 2009

Since the late 19th century, there have been 255 recessions in western economies. Of these, 164 have lasted just one year and only 32 have lasted for more than two years. In other words, two-thirds of recessions last a single year, and only one in eight lasts more than two years. If we strip out the peculiar circumstances at the end of the two world wars, 70 per cent of all recessions last just one year.
—Paul Ormerod, 27 July 2009: FT

The pace of descent in home price values appears to be slowing. There is a clear inflection point in the year-over-year data, due to four consecutive months of improved rates of return, after the steep decline that began in the fall of 2005…. To put it in perspective, these are the first time we have seen broad increases in home prices in 34 months. This could be an indication that home price declines are finally stabilizing

—David M. Blitzer, Chairman of the Index Committee at Standard & Poor’s.

If you’re looking for a bottom, there’s a lot of good stuff here. If you’re looking for a real recovery, it’s going to take some time.
—Karl Case

The change in momentum here is very significant.
—Robert Shiller

Were it not for those rate reductions and the moratorium, you’d see prices down right now
—Ronald Temple, co-Director of Research at Lazard Asset Management, who is expecting prices to stabilize at present and subsequently fall an additional 12-15%

Once again TV commentators that emphasize the year-over-year numbers being down 17% are welcome to have their sarcasm but they are missing the point as well as the turn. Recession is over, economy is recovering — let’s look forward and stop the backward looking focus.
—John Silva, Wells Fargo

The plunge in prices reflected the freezing of credit and all-round panic, which generated a step decline in home sales. Activity is now recovering, and with inventory falling, prices are dropping much less quickly and could even rise a bit over the next few months…We would not expect any gains to last, because prices are still high relative to incomes and rents, and also because the uptick in sales will, we think, prompt a new wave of supply. But this is still very welcome news today.
—Ian Shepherdson, High Frequency Economics